


Heavy Lies the Head

by inflomora, odetteandodile



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Bodyguard, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Royalty, Anal Sex, Angst with a Happy Ending, Art Embedded, Blow Jobs, Body Worship, First Time, Floriography, Friends to Lovers, Gardens & Gardening, Getting Together, Guard Steve Rogers, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Magic, Mutual Pining, Prince Bucky Barnes, Tender Forest Blow Jobs, True Love's Kiss, a tag I'm thrilled to reuse, homophobia doesn't exist in this kingdom, nsfw art embedded
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-26
Updated: 2020-06-21
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:55:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 59,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23861170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inflomora/pseuds/inflomora, https://archiveofourown.org/users/odetteandodile/pseuds/odetteandodile
Summary: A prince, a guardsman, a garden.When a curse is placed upon Prince James which says he is to be the instrument of his kingdom’s destruction, it’s decided that for his own good (and everyone else’s) he should be sent away from the royal city and the palace. Bucky goes into his exile with only a single solitary guardsman for both company and protection.Steve doesn’t know what to make of his new assignment—it could be a promotion or a punishment in equal measure. Personal guard to one of the royal family is an honor, but now he’s locked in a walled garden, uncertain of just who it is he’s been tasked to protect. Yet Prince James seems set on surprising him from the start.(The rest of the story is a fairy tale, or something like it...)
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 208
Kudos: 594





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> This fic, despite the eerily prescient plot, began before quarantine was yet on the horizon--but it's funny (not like, funny ha ha but you know) how life sometimes imitates art. Bucky and his garden in exile have become very precious to both of us as we've started planting seeds and gardens of our own to keep from going stir crazy these past weeks, when we weren't working on this story.
> 
> My deep thanks to inflomora who said YES let's go for it when I pitched this idea from a gorgeous landscape she'd posted on twitter. This really has honestly been a true collaboration from start to finish, and so much fun. There is so much beautiful art to come, and I can't wait for you to see it all because the words to this story wouldn't exist without the imagery, and inflomora is so so talented. We're really thrilled to bring you this one! 
> 
> This has all been written, and will be posted no less than once a week. It might be more, because I am a capricious god and time has absolutely no meaning. But it'll definitely be at least that often, so subscribe for updates and enjoy!! :)

There had never been a time when Bucky had not known that he was a prince. 

That his father’s kingdom was landlocked, hemmed in by a great mountain range to the north and a great forest to the west; that its strength lay not in large armies but in good soil and skilled farmers to work it; that their safety from neighboring kingdoms could be attributed to the respect due to its magical university, the best of any such school on this side of the Belten Sea; that there had been peace between it and its neighbors for two generations thanks in no small part to his father’s and his grandfather’s skill in peacemaking—these were things he learned as he grew up in the palace, at his father’s knee and from the line of tutors who took Bucky and Becca in hand as soon as they were old enough to be taught. 

But that he was a prince, Bucky had never not known. 

If he’d ever stopped over the years to think why he’d never had to learn it, he’d have supposed that it was because even in his cradle (trimmed with gold) he’d been treated as one. 

It never bothered him, really. At least not as a child. There were always benefits to being a spoiled son—king of his own little realm and the other little boys he played with, but who always knew who was in charge. 

Only Rebecca, his little sister, who was a bright, precocious baby who turned into a bright, whip-smart girl, could understand enough of their relative station in the world to both sympathize with him and vehemently _not_ sympathize with him when it was called for. 

He had never not known he was a prince—but that being a prince meant more than simply always having his own way and never being troubled by anything outside of his control (when it seemed to him that he controlled so much)…these were things that Bucky would eventually learn. 

***

It took Steve many years before he realized that he was poor. 

His mother Sarah was a kind, capable woman, full of stories, whose fingertips seemed fairly to glisten with the hedge magic she practiced from their little cottage at the edge of the western woods, and because of her Steve grew up so rich in so many things that it didn’t occur to him for a long time that they might _not_ have wealth of a material kind. 

Sarah had in her youth been trained as a ladies’ maid, and had lived for a time in the royal city, where she’d fallen in love with a young guardsman named Joseph. Although he was not yet rich or important, he was brave and strong, and neither had doubted that he would make a name for himself in the world. And so they had married, and moved into a small, shabby upper apartment at the outskirt of the royal city, looking forward to better times. 

But luck had not been on their side, and instead of better times, what had come for Joseph was a wasting sickness which even Sarah’s hedge magic had not been able to fight back. He died quietly in a long, lingeringly cold winter that held the year in its clutches well into April, taking many across the kingdom with it—leaving Sarah with a small savings and an even smaller baby boy, pale and sickly himself, though she always insisted he was clear-eyed and brave even in his cradle. 

So she’d moved back to be near the village she’d grown up in, and begun to keep herself and her boy fed on the little money she could make selling charms and tonics and garden remedies from her hearth. 

In the end, it was the stories that caused Steve, still a scrawny boy, to realize that they were not wealthy, when he understood how distant in more than miles their little corner of the kingdom was from the gleaming halls of the royal palace that shone in her words and his imagination.

He’d always liked the ones about his father best, and about the Royal Guard in which he’d served—the brave battles they fought keeping the kingdom safe. 

Probably Sarah should not have been surprised that soon as he was old enough to think of such a thing, Steve began to ask when _he_ might one day be sent to the royal city to train as a knight and guardsman like his father had been. And yet, when he’d asked her, eagerly, as she knelt among her herbs in the garden while he attacked a bale of hay with a stick he’d imagined into a sword, Sarah had begun to cry. 

Steve, only a very small boy of six or seven, had never been the reason his mother had cried before, and he’d dropped his sword at once in horror, bursting immediately into tears of his own. He flung himself to her side with sobbing apologies, even though he didn’t really understand what he’d done wrong. Sarah had soothed him at once, but the next time Steve had told her about his dreams of fighting raiders and dragons and performing brave deeds, she’d sighed, and sat him down on his little stool in the kitchen, and explained very carefully. 

“The royal city is very far away Steven—far away from me. It costs a great deal to train as a knight, and not just in coin. It costs more than I have to spend—at least for a little while yet. I love you too much to pay it to have you go away from me so soon.” 

Steve had nodded solemnly, and kissed her cheek. After that, he’d gone deeper into the trees when he wanted to play knight, so that it wouldn’t make his mother sad to see him. 

But still, he felt deep inside his little bones that one day he would serve the kingdom and do great, brave things. 

***

The first time it occurs to Bucky that the world, even his charmed bubble in it, is not a perfect place, he’s ten years old. Ten years old is perhaps _too_ old never to have seen the shadows even in the most brightly lit life, but Bucky had always been not just an understandably spoiled child, but also a naturally good-tempered one—it isn’t in his nature to look for dark things until they’ve made themselves too clear to be ignored. 

He discovers it one day while playing a game of hide-and-seek with Rebecca—a game he likes, because he’s ten and Rebecca only eight, and therefore he’s had two extra years of experience with the palace over her to know all the best hiding places, and so he almost always wins. 

Today he’d sought out a spot he’d been saving—Rebecca has been doing a bit too well in finding him this afternoon for his liking, so he’d crept into his father’s study where he knew of a cabinet that was usually filled with maps that had been recently taken out and hung about the walls in another chamber. He doesn’t think Rebecca would have noticed that, and so it’s unlikely she’d think to look in a place where usually there’s no room to hide, and he feels very clever. 

But as he waits for Rebecca—not to find him, but for the satisfying moments he’s sure she’ll eventually come into the room and look in all the other places he isn’t, while he watches through a crack in the cabinet door and will have to try his best not to laugh and give the game away—instead the door opens to admit his father, head bowed in deep conversation with his trusted advisor, the mage Alexander Pierce. 

“We can do well enough by our people without resorting to that Alexander,” his father is saying, in a low, serious voice. 

Bucky draws back further into the cabinet, suddenly feeling a glimmer of doubt about whether or not this had been a good idea—he rarely gets into trouble with his parents, but then, the fact that it happens infrequently makes him especially reluctant to have it occur at all. He wonders if his father would be unhappy to find him here. 

Alexander Pierce’s voice is even—Bucky has never heard his tone waver, no matter the circumstance. He always addresses Bucky, if he ever takes notice of him, in exactly the same voice he tone he uses with ambassadors and guardsmen and servants. Bucky doesn’t know if that’s a good or a bad thing. 

“Your majesty,” Pierce says, slowly, almost coaxing, “I know your commitment to this peace treaty. But think—if you controlled Port Comfort—” 

King George shakes his head again, looking displeased. “No. It would be disastrous to do this, just consider—” 

“Queen Ann is old, Majesty, and she is weak—surely the other lands have noticed it, and if you don’t press the opportunity I assure you someone else _will_. Eventually someone will move against her, and if it is not you we might end up at the mercy of—” 

“ _No_ , Alexander,” Bucky’s father says, more forcefully, and Bucky flinches a little at the sternness in his gentle father’s voice. “Anyone who does this will begin a reaction of events that none of the five lands will be able to escape. If I move to the south, we will lose our allies to the east—and we will all of us be vulnerable to attack from the north. We are strongest together, in peace. I won’t begin a war that might end with my people pressed into service, with fields going untended and children starved for an unneeded fight with our neighbors. Queen Ann has always allowed us to trade freely across her borders, there is no need for what you suggest.” 

“As you wish, your majesty,” Pierce says, with a small bow. 

Then they’re gone from the room, exiting through the tall doors toward the assembly halls where his father holds court. 

Bucky waits for a few quiet minutes after they leave, and then slips from the cabinet and back out into the palace halls, frowning and deep in thought. 

He tries to imagine the picture his father had described—children, without food? Could such a thing happen? He likes tales of great battles as much as any little boy, but now he tries to picture himself and his friends in armor, on horses, faceless opponents riding down on them with bared swords…

“I found you!” Becca yells, startling him. Then she frowns, looking around the wide corridor. “Bucky, you’re meant to be hiding.” 

“I’m tired,” Bucky says, shrugging her off. “I don’t want to play anymore.” 

By dinner time, his worries have evaporated again, consumed by the normal pace of lessons and meals and the complacent comfort of the rhythm of life in the palace. But he never quite forgets the little burst of fear he’d felt listening to his father and Alexander speak, and the realization that even things that never seemed to change _could_ if the right—or wrong—people decided to make them. 

***

On Steve’s eleventh birthday, his mother makes him an oat cake. 

They celebrate together by eating it on a soft bank of grass at the edge of the woods, out of the hot summer sunshine, and Sarah tells him—as she does every year—the story of the day he was born. 

“Your father didn’t have the Sight,” she says, as she always did, “but I believe he must have had it that day, because just as the midwife laid you in my arms he burst through the door, still wearing his armor, his face red like he was cooking in all that metal like a stewed tomato, and he said he’d known somehow right in the middle of a patrol that it was time to come home.” 

“Mama,” Steve says, when she finishes, squaring his shoulders and gathering up his courage to say what he knows it is time to. 

“Yes, my Steven?” Sarah asks in a soft voice, her fingers twining in a tall stalk of grass. 

“I want to go to the royal city. I’m old enough—I want to train as a guard, like my father.” 

His mother sighs heavily then, and Steve can see the prickle of tears in her eyes as she looks at him, her lovely, creased face sad. It still hurts him to hurt her like this, but he understands it better now and he knows there’s no help for it if he’s going to do what he knows he must. 

“I know, my darling. I have Seen you there. I just hoped maybe it wasn’t time yet—maybe there would be time for you to grow stronger here, first.” 

Steve bows his head, chewing on the inside of his cheek. “I’m eleven now. That’s when the other boys start. I’m ready.” 

“I’m not,” Sarah says, wrapping her arm around his shoulders in a tight hug. “But then, I won’t ever be ready for that.” 

Steve lays his head on her shoulder. “You mean—you’re going to let me?” 

“It’s going to be hard,” she says just above a whisper, and Steve isn’t sure if she means that it will be hard letting him go, or that it will be hard for him, training. He supposes both might be true. “I have a friend or two still in the palace, who will keep an eye on you. I wish that I could send you with all the things that other boys will have, money for all the things you’ll need—I’m afraid you will have to do more work than the rest for us to afford them.” 

“I know,” he says. 

“You’re my brave boy.” 

“I love you, mama.” 

“And I love you—never forget that.” 

“I won’t.” 

A month later, Sarah watches as Steve climbs up onto the back of a wagon loaded with grains and bound for the royal city, a small shabby bag with his few possessions clutched to his chest. 

She doesn’t cry as she waves him off, and so Steve tries not to cry either as they pull out of sight of the little cottage at the edge of the wood for her sake. 

When he arrives at the palace, he’s led to a dormitory with the other boys his age just starting out in the training that will make them into knights. They’re all bigger than him, and they all have more than one bag filled with clothes and books and things to make their lives here comfortable. 

In between lessons and training, though he’s tired and bruised, Steve sweeps up in the kitchen and runs errands for the cook, who remembers Sarah fondly, and little by little finds him work enough for the coin that will pay for the meager essentials he needs. 

It will be a long time before he can buy the kind of things the other boys have—the leather boots and specially made practice weapons, the clean shirts to replace the ones he rips rather than having to mend them endlessly himself, or the sweets and books they trade after practice—but even so, he’s on his way, and he decides that is enough not to care about those things any oftener than he can help it. 

***

The year that Bucky turns twelve is the year his father determines it’s time for his lessons to begin including what he calls “practical understanding” of what it means that he will one day be king. 

What it really means is that twice a week Bucky now sits beside his father’s throne as he hears petitions from subjects, and reports from his advisors on the state of the borders and the harvest and a thousand and one other things that King George must make decisions about to keep the kingdom running. 

It’s only a month or two sitting through interminable hours of it before Becca begs and whines and wheedles enough that she’s allowed to join them, which Bucky feels with mixed emotions. On the one hand, his father had made a great to-do about how it was a right of passage for the heir to the throne on his twelfth birthday, which now seems silly since his just-ten-year-old little sister will be included as well. On the other hand, Becca always listens with rapt attention and interest, and she’s better at explaining to him what exactly he ought to think about it afterward than he was by himself. Soon his father begins to take them into his study afterward, as long as he has time and there’s nothing else pressing, and asks them to discuss with him what they heard. Then Bucky is glad that he isn’t alone—he can usually think of something to say after Rebecca has spoken first. 

It’s not that he’s stupid—he’d always done as well with his lessons, better in some of them, as his sister. But his mind tends to wander in the soaring throne room. One moment he’s listening to his father’s advisor about the late spring rains that have been falling on the eastern plains, and then next he’s roaming that flat golden land in his mind, dreaming about how big the sky must look there and how much he’d like to see it—and suddenly the advisor is gone, and he’s missed the rest of his speech. 

Bucky tries hard not to disappoint his father, and many times he succeeds—because he _can_ if he really puts his mind to it. But sometimes he forgets to pay as close attention as he should, and he can’t answer when his father asks what he might do, were he the king. He thinks, angrily, that his father drives a hard bargain. He’s only twelve after all, and sitting still isn’t easy for any boy of twelve—he’ll be better at it when he’s grown up, that should be obvious. 

It’s one of those days, when his father had pursed his lips and shaken his head a little before releasing them from their “lessons,” when Bucky knows he hadn’t listened as well as he should have, or been as thoughtful as the king had wanted. He’d made a joke out of it when his father had asked him what he’d do about the damage that a recent flood had caused to a dam somewhere in the middle of the country that had destroyed several acres of fields. 

“Why, hire a squadron of beavers, of course,” he’d said. 

Rebecca had laughed, but his father hadn’t. 

It’s put him in a foul mood, his blood filled with a restless energy born of irritation. 

He finds one of his friends, kicking his heels as he reads a book in a window looking out over the gardens, where it’s a sunshiney afternoon here, despite whatever bad weather they’re having in the east. 

“Let’s go have a race,” Bucky says, cuffing Charles on the shoulder in a way he knows will provoke him. 

Charles looks up with a satisfying flash of annoyance and drops his book at once, hopping up from the window. 

“Fine, only if you promise not to be mean when you lose—you know you can never beat me on foot,” says the other boy, bitingly. 

Bucky’s cheeks flame with an answering flare of temper, but with a little bit of triumph too—this is what he needs. He’ll beat Charles today, and then Charles will see how mean he can be when he wins, and that will show him. 

Charles has been a part of Bucky’s little band in the palace since they were both toddling, and Bucky thinks of him as a friend, though as they’ve gotten older he’s almost never one that Bucky would seek out on his own. Bucky may be spoiled, but he’s not cruel—Charles has increasingly been both over the years, and they’ve quarreled more than once when he’d teased Rebecca badly in Bucky’s hearing. Today though, Bucky’s dislike of him makes him a perfect companion for Bucky’s own ill-tempered mood.

They jostle each other down the hall, around the long stone staircase that leads into the gardens, bumping shoulders with a bit more force than is necessary. 

“We’ll start here,” Bucky says imperiously, stopping at the end of a long lane of smooth turf at the edge of the carefully arranged paths. He likes to command Charles to do things now and then, when he knows he can get away with it. 

To the right are the royal gardens—the ones for pleasure and for show, decorous rows of flowers and hedges in artful mazes, made for walking in and feasting the eyes. There are a few clusters of well-heeled ladies and gentleman weaving their way through the pleasant day there, and Bucky frowns. He doesn’t want to get in trouble for causing a ruckus. 

Further down is a tall line of boxwood trees, beyond which begin the kitchen gardens, where the plants are arranged not for beauty but for use, growing vegetables and other mysterious things which Bucky vaguely knows somehow end up the palace’s tables at meal times. 

“Down this lane,” he says, pointing, “as far as we can run in a straight line to the end of the kitchen garden and back.” 

“Okay,” Charles says, sneering. “Go!” 

Bucky has only a split second to think of objecting—it’s _his_ race, he should be the one to say _go_ —before breaking into a run himself. Despite Charles’ attempts at being a cheat, Bucky still intends to win. 

He catches Charles just about at where the line of boxwoods splits the two sides of the gardens, and he’s exultant as he does so—Charles is used to being faster than him, but Bucky has been shooting up in the past few months, his legs lengthening toward the height everyone has always predicted for him. 

They scramble at the end of the lane as they come up against a raised vegetable bed, skidding as they turn. 

Bucky’s confident that he’s practically already won as he spins around—but then one of Charles’ feet catches between his ankles, sending them both sprawling in between the planter boxes. 

Bucky is disoriented for a moment, flat on his back, before rolling over to his knees, chest tight with anger. Charles looks back at him with a falsely innocent expression. 

“You _cheater_ ,” Bucky snarls between his teeth. 

“ _I_ fell too didn’t I? Why would I do that on purpose if I wanted to win?” 

“You _didn’t_ do it to win you—you did it so you wouldn’t lose!” Bucky sputters back, nearly spitting with rage. 

“So _you_ say,” Charles shoots back, rising to his feet and brushing off where the grass has stained his knees as if he doesn’t care at all. 

Bucky’s words fail him in his anger—so he reaches for the next best thing. Between them, there’s a garden bed full of rich, newly turned earth. Without thinking, Bucky plunges his hands into it, coming up with two muddy fists full of mud that he flings at the back of Charles’ stupid head. 

Charles spins, mouth gaping. “You—” he gasps. But he doesn’t pause for words long either, plunging toward the mud and taking up his own handfuls to fight back. 

Soon enough the throwing turns into wrestling, both of them flinging each other bodily into the turned-up soil. Bucky manages to grind a satisfying handful into Charles’ hair, but then Charles tackles him down into it so that Bucky’s flat on his chest in the thick mud until he can squirm and claw his way onto his back to kick Charles off of him again. 

“Bucky!” Charles yells at him as he yanks hard at Bucky’s foot, and Bucky grins nastily as he shoves at him again—

“What in _god’s name_ do you think you’re doing?” Demands an angry voice above them, momentarily pausing their scuffle. 

A boy wearing the livery of the palace servants is standing beside the planter, a broom held tightly in both hands. He’s on the small side, pale face and pale hair even in the bright sunlight, but he’s glowering fiercely, and his voice is loud and authoritative. Bucky immediately feels a wash of guilt, looking down at himself covered in mud, in the ruinous heaps of the previously tidy bed. 

Charles shows no such remorse, releasing Bucky’s foot and squaring his shoulders haughtily. 

“You’d best mind your own business, boy,” he says, words dripping with disdain. 

“This garden _is_ my business,” the boy says, staunchly, widening his stance. “Do you know that Cecile just laid down good seed in that this morning? And now you’ve ruined it.” 

“ _Cecile_ can do it over,” Charles says, acidly, brushing at the dirt on the front of his doublet, as if it will do any good. 

“Charles, enough, he’s right we should—” Bucky says, standing, feeling very conscious of how his feet sink in the fresh soil, tamping it down, likely crushing anything that had been planted in it, just as the boy says. 

“No, _Bucky_ , he can’t talk to us like that—” 

“It’s my _job_ to tend to these beds today,” the boy says, stepping forward, his brow lowering even further over large, reproachful blue eyes, “and wherever you belong it definitely isn’t here, so you’d better get—” 

Before Bucky can register what he means to do, Charles has raised his hand and cuffed the other boy hard with the back of it, leaving a smear of mud and a flare of pink across his cheek. 

The servant boy raises his hand to his cheek in disbelief, mouth dropping open, and Bucky can see the spark of hatred lighting in them just before he starts toward Charles. 

“Wait!” Bucky says, hurling himself between the small blond boy and Charles. It’s clear to Bucky that in their current, filthy state the boy has not realized who they are, or what kind of troubled he’d be in if he gave Charles the thrashing he very much deserves. “I’m sorry, you’re right—I’ll—” he grips Charles’ arm as hard as he can, willing him to stay still. “We’ll go. I’m sorry.” 

“And what am I to tell Cecile about why her garden has been destroyed, and planting set back two weeks?” The boy demands, clenching his jaw and curling his fists again around the handle of his broom as if he might like to crack it down over both their heads. Bucky feels terribly like he should be allowed to. 

“Tell Cecile that her _prince_ may destroy anything in this palace that he likes, and she can thank him for it,” Charles spits from behind Bucky’s shoulder, and Bucky withers a little at the statement. 

“You—you’re no prince,” the boy says, but he looks between them, uncertainly. 

“But he is,” Charles says, shoving at Bucky’s shoulder. Bucky twists his merciless grip on Charles’ upper arm. 

“Be quiet _now_ , Charles,” Bucky says, mustering up as much tone of command as he can. Charles, at last goes silent. 

“I really am sorry,” Bucky says to the boy, whose wide eyes have fixed on him, the anger that was sparkling in them a moment ago giving way to a small flash of fear. “We’ll go. Please tell Cecile—tell anyone—that it was my fault. If anyone gives you trouble about it—tell them to send a note for Prince James, and I’ll answer that it wasn’t your doing.” 

The boy swallows hard, and nods his head—not quite a proper bow, but a gesture toward one. Bucky doesn’t even like that the boy feels forced to give him that right now, when he feels like such a thoughtless ass. 

“Very well…your majesty,” the boy says. His jaw is clenched, and Bucky can see the muscles working in it, under the livid spot where Charles hand had struck. 

“Come _now_ , Charles,” Bucky says, shaking his arm. Charles mouth twists, and he gives Bucky a last defiant look, as if he’d like to disobey—but Bucky glares back at him. He’s not going to be challenged right now. Charles turns, nose in the air, and stomps out of the garden, his feet leaving deep, malicious tracks behind him. Bucky climbs over the side of it instead, onto the grass between the boxes to follow. 

He glances one more time at the boy over his shoulder, standing with his head bowed in thought, looking at the mess of churned earth in front of him. He makes sure Charles is well away from the gardens before breaking into a run, not wanting to be anywhere near him any more. 

Bucky feels guilty about the trail of dirt he leaves through the palace hallways on his way to his room, guilty about his ruined clothes, guilty about the small boy and whatever he had had to tell the palace gardener. Most of all, he feels guilty that he’d let his own bad mood today goad him into sinking to a level with Charles. 

He thinks about Charles hitting the boy, who hadn’t had any reason to know he wasn’t allowed to yell at them for doing something that was certainly wrong. Bucky makes up his mind that he isn’t going to spend time with Charles any more. 

At dinner that night, his mother turns to him over the meal, and asks mildly, 

“Bucky, were you and your friend playing in the kitchen garden today?” 

“I—” Bucky says, quailing. “Yes, mother.” 

“One of our little pages, a boy named Steven, almost got into some very serious trouble over it,” Winifred says, frowning. “But he told the cook that you said it was your fault, and that they could ask you about it.” 

“Yes mother,” Bucky agrees. 

“Well, that was good of you. Though I wish you hadn’t made the mess in the first place. If you want to muck around in the dirt we can find somewhere else for you to do it, out of the way of the staff. They work hard enough without you making things difficult on them because you’re in high spirits a given day.” 

“I didn’t think—I know it was wrong, now. I won’t do it again.” 

“That’s fine darling, you owned up to it and it’s all well in the end.” 

After that, the conversation ends—at least as far as his mother is concerned. But Bucky can’t think of that day for some time without a little rush of self-recrimination. 

He’d always known he was a prince—but it occurs to him now, just what it means that he might be able to get away with things that others can’t. He vows to himself that he will try not to take it for granted again, nor to let others bear the brunt of his thoughtless decisions. If he and Charles had simply left the garden without being seen, that boy—Steven—would probably have had to answer for all the consequences of the crop, ruined through no fault of his own. 

Charles may be the kind of person who would not only have accepted but even preferred that. Bucky doesn’t think he wants to be, if he can help it. 

When he sees Steven again, he’s in his page’s livery and standing beside one of the great doors to his father’s audience hall, opening it for important visitors as they come and go. 

Bucky greets him by name, and the boy looks up at him, surprised out of his half-bow. 

“It’s just Steve,” he says, after a moment. 

“Alright,” Bucky replies. 

He thinks he’d like to say something else—but Steve is already opening the arched wooden door for him, and Bucky’s body obeys the force of habit. 

Bucky sees him every now and again as the years go by, both of them growing and changing with their passage. Sometimes he’ll raise a hand in recognition, and Steve will nod to him. Mostly when Bucky sees him, Steve is absorbed in hard work as he had been the first time, and they pass through each other’s presence unacknowledged. 

***

When the time comes that they are both grown, and Steve has become a full member of the royal guard, Bucky doesn’t notice that he no longer sees Steve in the halls of the palace. If he had, he’d have guessed correctly that Steve was away serving as his father’s soldier in the far flung reaches of the kingdom. 

But by then his father’s closest advisor, Alexander Pierce—a man with dangerous magic and more dangerous ambition—has at last begun to make his final grab for the power he has always craved, and Bucky and the kingdom find themselves with troubles of their own.

***


	2. A Royal Summons

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve receives a royal summons; Natasha dabbles in the truth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to those of you who commented on the first chapter and said you were excited, it really gave me something to look forward to this week! 
> 
> Art featured this chapter: a fab portrait of our favorite badass lady, Natasha Romanoff aka The Black Widow.

Steve glances at the rolled message beside him for the thirteenth or fourteenth time in the hour since the page had delivered it to him, and hastily splashes a few handfuls of cool water from the basin onto his face. 

He inspects the faint mottling of a soon-to-be bruise along the lower right side of his jaw in the wavy mirror above the washbasin, running his hand over the rough stubble there. The red imprint of Natasha’s practice gloves isn’t too bad, but it does make him look a little less respectable than he’d like. He wishes he had time at least to shave—but the message had requested him at his earliest convenience, and when a Captain of the Royal Guard receives a summons like that from its highest Commander, Steve doesn’t think “convenience” is meant to stretch very far. 

It had been the page, in his royal livery, calling Steve’s name from the edge of the courtyard that had distracted him long enough to let Natasha land a hit—he’d been holding his own against her fairly well otherwise, not something he can always claim to be true. Steve might be a good, strong fighter, but he can rarely match Natasha’s lightning speed. It’s why he chooses her for a sparring partner as often as not. Sparring with Sam or Clint is good exercise, but they’re too evenly matched generally for it to push him much. 

They’ve only been back on palace grounds less than a sennight, having returned from a successful three weeks defending the border towns from the raiders whose attacks have been growing more and more bold of late. It’s usual in early spring that small armed parties of them make their way along the northern edges of the kingdom, taking little nibbling bites from those towns and villages nestled against the foothills. But this year Steve’s squadron had found themselves in skirmishes much deeper into King George’s land than they normally are brave enough to venture. 

Still, Steve’s crew had acquitted themselves well, saving farms and towns from being pillaged and burned and pushing back the overly ambitious bands with—what Steve modestly thinks—was some competent efficiency. 

And so he’s hopeful, as he pulls on a clean white tunic and his blue and gold Royal livery, that this summons to speak with Commander Phillips is a good thing. 

Though he’s a worrier by nature, he can’t think of a reason why he’d be getting called to task—not after the successes of the past month. Still, his heart beats a little heavier than usual in anticipation as he takes long strides out of the barracks and through the winding outer passages into the central parts of the palace. It’s not every day that a Captain of the guard is asked to attend an audience in the Royal Commander’s meeting chamber. 

The hopeful part of him, the part he silences for fear of jinxing his own recent good luck, wonders if maybe he’s going to be given a promotion. He’d sent in his reports about the raider activities, about the seeming increase of aggression along the northern border, two nights after they’d arrived back at the palace. Perhaps, the work he and his squadron had done there had been impressive enough to consider giving him a larger command, more fighters and more responsibility to return north to continue their work better supplied. 

He shakes his head, and squeezes his fist around the scroll of parchment bearing the Commander’s seal. Maybe he’ll only be asked to reiterate his report, a sort of due diligence on Commander Phillips’ part to make sure he understands the situation. 

Maybe his report had been unclear, and he’s going to be reprimanded for stirring alarm where Commander Phillips believes it to be unnecessary. 

Steve shakes that thought off too—borrowing trouble is as useful, or useless, as prematurely heaping himself with imagined praise. Either way, he’ll find out which it is to be soon enough. 

As he draws nearer to the heart of the palace, toward the royal assembly rooms and great hall and the chambers where the royal family and important people live, the stone hallways widen and grow lighter, the windows here larger, safely away from the need to protect against stray arrows. The materials are richer, too, the heavy grey stone faces of the walls encased in smooth, gleaming marble. 

Steve’s heart ticks up again and he carefully straightens the bottom of his tunic as he approaches the large carved doors to the meeting chamber. 

An alert squire, perhaps 16 or 17 years old, looking very serious and convinced of the importance of his post, steps forward from beside the door. Steve nods to him, equally seriously—he remembers being a squire himself, taking his palace duties with the utmost conviction of his vital role, even when that role was just standing beside an inner palace door waiting for someone more important to arrive. 

“Captain Rogers,” Steve tells the boy, holding out the message scroll. “I was requested to attend Commander Phillips.” 

The boy nods brusquely, and doesn’t take the paper, instead turning and pushing one of the tall wooden leaves of the door so that it swings inward. 

“You’re expected,” the boy says, pitching his voice deep, and Steve surpasses a smile. 

Steve steps past him, tucking the message into the leather belt at his waist. 

The Commander’s meeting room is large, an imposingly dark wood-paneled space with soaring ceilings. Maps nearly as tall as Steve line one wall of it, and a massive desk fills the far end. 

Commander Phillips stands up from behind it, nodding to Steve curtly as Steve makes him a respectful bow. 

“Captain Rogers, come in. Sit down.” 

Steve holds his head high as he crosses the long space, taking a chair across the wide expanse of Phillips’ desk, but waiting to sit until the Commander has resumed his seat. 

Phillips sighs, shuffling the parchment on his desk to one side, a heavy frown creasing his already heavily lined face. 

Steve studies him furtively, trying to guess at the nature of his summons. It’s really impossible, since he’s never seen anything like a smile on the old man’s face—there’s no way to know if he’s euphoric or miserable. Steve wonders if he looks tireder than usual though…the bags under his eyes, always impressive, seem like they might be more shadowy than usual. 

Of course, even from the borderlands, Steve has heard the rumors to know why he might be harder pressed of late. 

Steve waits silently, not letting his impatience show on his face. 

Phillips at last seems to remember he’s there, and sits up straighter, tugging at the neck of his rumpled livery. He looks like he hasn’t changed it in some time. 

“You’ve been doing fine work, Captain,” he says, in his brusque monotone. 

“Thank you, sir.” 

“Fine work,” Phillips repeats, seemingly to himself. He sighs again. “Your report on the situation on the northern border was enlightening reading. Rest assured your recommendations about our resources there will not go unattended by me.” 

“I—yes, sir,” Steve says, not sure what else to say. 

“I have a new assignment for you, Rogers.” Phillips says, his brow somehow managing to lower even further. “One that I hope you’ll acquit with the same competence you’ve shown in in the command of your squadron.” 

Steve feels his hopes rising in him again, and he sits up straighter. “Yes, sir—I believe with only a slightly increased supply of soldiers, we could secure the Northern Territory effectively, I’m fully prepared to—” 

Phillips raises a hand, and Steve stops talking at once, chagrined. He’d apparently read the situation wrong, and he’s annoyed as he always is that he can feel the hot blush on his neck in his embarrassment at having overstepped. 

“I believe you are, and that you could. Unfortunately that’s not where I need you.” 

Steve nods, but doesn’t speak again. 

Phillips stands from his chair, and turns to the tall window behind him, no longer looking at Steve. 

“You’re a good man, Captain, and a good soldier. You’ve done well with a very limited set of resources, and—unfortunately, maybe for you—that’s exactly what I find myself in need of. It’s a promotion, in name. But it might not feel like one. Still,” he says, turning around again and leveling Steve with a baleful stare, “I know you will do your duty to the kingdom, and well.” 

“Of course, sir.” Steve agrees. _Promotion_ was one of the words he’d secretly hoped to hear…but the rest is not as auspicious as he’d dreamed. 

“You’ll have heard, of course, about Alexander Pierce’s recent banishment from the court?” 

Steve hesitates, not wanting to expose himself again—though of course he’s heard, everyone has heard of the man’s fall from grace, and his parting words that have hung already like a dark cloud over the palace. Like most of the Royal Guard, like most of the kingdom, really, Steve had felt the betrayal as a personal one. Even in the far northern reaches of the kingdom, he’d seen villagers less concerned about the immediate threat of raiding parties than they were anxious for the King, the Queen, and their prince—threatened by a vindictive and powerful man with a magic none of them understood except to know it was wicked and dangerous. Steve had thought, briefly, of writing to his mother for advice—but he’d dismissed the urge as fast as it had occurred. Sarah is, after all, not much more than a hedgewitch, and it is unlikely she could provide any knowledge to the royal family that they weren’t able to get from the mages at the university. Still, Steve had felt as powerless as the rest of them, and he’d wished it was something that might make a difference. 

Steve nods, carefully. 

“The King and Queen are fearful for Prince James, as the target of Pierce’s possible attempts at retribution. His safety is paramount to them, as you’ll understand.” 

Steve nods again. 

“We feel—all of us—that it is impossible to assure that safety here in the palace. In a few days’ time, plans are being made to remove him from harms way here, until such a time as we can be certain he faces no danger.” Phillips just looks at Steve for a moment, like he’s expecting Steve to respond, but Steve doesn’t quite follow where Phillips is pointing. “He’ll be secreted from the palace, to a secure location. And he will require a guard. We feel it unwise to call attention to his new location by the presence of a large report. But one man, if he is competent and sure, should be able to guard him well. I’ve decided that man is you.” 

Steve looks back at him, nonplussed. “I’m to be—a personal guard? To the prince?” 

“That’s right.” 

“It’s—I am honored, sir.” Steve says, not sure if it’s true. 

Phillips makes a _hmmph_ noise. “It’s a lonely job. Maybe a dangerous one. It’s not like it would be if he were going on here.” 

“I understand, sir.” 

Under normal circumstances, to be plucked from the ranks of the Royal Guard to serve as a personal protector to a member of the royal family is the highest honor a guardsman could hope for. It’s also, normally, a coveted position for the other benefits of proximity to the royal family—attending royal functions, riding beside them in their trips out into the kingdom, eating beside the family, being visible as the most trusted of their ranks. But if the prince is being sent away…

Phillips is raising his eyebrows, waiting for a response. Steve understands, now, that Phillips is _asking_ him. In as much as the Commander of the Royal Guard asks anyone how they like their assignment, Phillips is giving him a chance to balk. 

Steve straightens his shoulders, and peers back at Phillips steadily. 

“I’m ready to do my duty, and to serve my King, sir. Wherever I’m needed.” 

Phillips gives a short, sharp nod. “Good. That’s good.” 

Steve wonders if Phillips has expected him to refuse. Steve can’t imagine how he would, and still be able to look himself in the mirror. He’d joined the guard to be where he was needed, after all. Even if a small part of him wishes he’d been needed as a commanding officer in the fights which are sure to continue in the north, where he’s already spent so much of his energies and skill defending. 

Phillips walks from behind his desk, and raps on a smaller door off of the large chamber. 

Steve is already rising from his seat, so as not to be sitting in his Commander’s presence while he stands, but his motion turns quickly into a suppressed gasp of surprise, bending over into a bow when he realizes who is coming through the door. 

He stays like that, bent at the waist, as King George, with Queen Winifred on his arm, enters the room, the prince trailing in behind them. Phillips closes the door as the three step into the room, and Steve moves hastily away from the chair he’d been sitting in so that the three royals can sit. 

None of them do. 

“Captain Rogers,” the the king says, in a quiet, measured voice. 

Steve can’t bow any deeper, so he takes it as permission to stand up straight again instead, only his head respectfully inclined. 

“Your Highness,” he says. 

“You know the danger, threatened against my son, Captain?” 

This time it’s the queen who speaks, her voice soft—her face is somewhat careworn, and Steve thinks she looks particularly drawn and pale, compared to the last time he’d been anywhere close enough to see, at last year’s Midsummer celebration. She’s never been an ostentatious person, dressing simply for her rank, but she’d been happy then, and laughing, and he had understood why the King—and the kingdom—had once fallen in love with her many years before, when King George had brought her home as a bride. 

“I—” Steve cuts his eyes to Phillips, not certain how much he’s supposed to know, when most of what he does he learned by unofficial gossip. But he thinks that what she wants is reassurance, not protocol, and so he says, staunchly, “Yes, your majesty. I understand.” 

Winifred nods, sadly. “We just want to keep him safe, Captain. As safe as seclusion and your presence will assure.” 

“I understand, your majesty,” Steve repeats, firmly. If his feelings about the unglamorous assignment had been mixed a few moments ago, his reservations dissipate in the face of the King and Queen’s obvious worry and sorrow. He _can_ do this—they won’t be let down, by him at least. 

“Do you understand we have no idea how long I’ll have to be away? Did they tell you there’s no guarantees they’ll sort it out?” 

Steve looks in surprise, for the first time, at the prince, whose piercing blue eyes are glued to his face with something that isn’t quite suspicion—but isn’t confidence either. His face, too, shows the burden of sleepless nights—he’s pale and wan, his long hair braided back between his shoulders away from his sharp, finely shaped face. He, at least, Steve has seen often enough to be sure that the changes in his appearance are recent, though he can’t exactly say why he’d paid close enough attention to note them. James’ mother lays a quieting hand on his arm, hushing him. But James shakes it off, raising his eyebrows expectantly at Steve. He actually wants a reply. 

Steve flicks his eyes between the King and Queen, not sure if he’s allowed to speak freely or at all. But they just look back at him, patiently, and the King gives a small gesture with his hand urging him to answer. 

“I…understand that at this moment very little is certain,” Steve says, slowly. “But that what is certain is that it’s best that you don’t remain here, and that wherever you’re being sent you’ll need someone who you can rely on to guard you to the fullest extent possible. And that I’m ready and willing to do whatever it takes to do so. Whatever is required to keep you safe.” 

The queen’s shoulders slump, and the king looks both relieved and somewhat defeated. James meets Steve’s eyes for another long moment, and Steve—not sure if it’s the right thing to do, but because he is who he is—holds them. After a moment James looks away.

“Fine,” James says. “Make your arrangements, Commander.” 

Phillips gives a stiff little bow. “Majesties.” 

“Thank you, Captain,” the King says, offering his arm to his wife. James has already turned, making his way again for the door. 

Steve bows again, deeply, until all three have made their way from the room. 

“Well, then that’s that.” Phillips says, sitting back in his chair. “The traveling party will be ready to take you both in two days’ time, departing from the southern gate two hours before dawn. You may take that time to prepare your squadron, and to make me a recommendation for their new command.” 

“Lieutenant Wilson,” Steve says, without having to think about it. “Would do the job well.” 

“Fine, good,” Phillips says. “Go on, Rogers—tell him yourself. You can send him to me this evening to make it official.” 

It’s a clear dismissal, and Steve turns on the heel of his boot and makes a hasty retreat down the long room, his head swimming with thoughts about the next two days—and what may or may not come after that. 

***

Because he’s preoccupied, Steve doesn’t notice that when he gets back to his barracks room, the door is already unlocked, though he’d certainly locked it when he’d left. 

He turns the handle without thinking, and enters his bedroom with his mind a hundred miles away in several different directions. 

But he crashes back to the present with a start as he realizes his empty room is not empty, at first with an unavoidable jolt of alarm—and then a sigh of resigned recognition. 

“What do you want?” He asks Natasha, moving past her to his wash basin to splash cold water on his face. 

Natasha smiles at him, turning from where she’s been perusing his bookshelf, apparently having let herself in at some point in the hour since he left. She’s still dressed for sparring in her training gear, every inch of her looking as deadly as Steve knows her to be. 

“What do you think I want?” She asks, setting down a vial of bruise balm beside the other little collection of bottles labelled in Sarah’s clear handwriting. Sarah always makes sure Steve is well-supplied with her various assortment of remedies, and everyone in the Guard knows to come knocking on Steve’s door when they need quick relief from the kinds of scrapes and pains that come with weapons practice. 

“Hmmph,” Steve says, toweling off his face and shaking his bangs from his eyes. 

He knows precisely why Natasha’s here—the arrival of a royal summons wouldn’t even have escaped Clint’s notice in the courtyard, much less hers. 

To call Natasha a gossip would be to dangerously underestimate her nose for sussing out information. Of course, she _does_ always also have the best gossip in the sense that she’s as interested in learning about people’s love affairs and grudges, rivalries and family matters as she is in the events of state. 

Steve cocks his head at that thought, considering her, and Natasha raises her eyebrow knowingly. 

“I’ll share with you if you share with me,” she says, mouth quirking up at the corner. 

“Okay,” Steve says, knowing that whatever she knows will be a much greater sum than his news, so he’s bound to get the better of that deal. “But not here—you up for a ride?” 

Natasha nods, and Steve moves quickly to his chest of drawers to discard his clean palace doublet for one of his leather training ones, grabbing up his riding gloves as well. 

They make their way quickly and without conversation toward the stables, saddling their horses with the speed of long practice, and soon they’re riding side by side at an easy trot through the palace gates into the countryside. 

It’s a crisp, cool afternoon, and the silence between them as they leave the royal city behind is a comfortable one. 

Steve had been a royal page, working at his training as a guard for a a year when a small redheaded girl had joined their ranks. After that the two of them had been paired off in training more often than not—at first it had been an insult, owing to the fact that they were the smallest of the pages learning their fighting skills. But it hadn’t remained an insult for long. Natasha was fast and determined, picking up every task they were assigned with ease, and Steve, if not the strongest in those early days, was certainly the most stubborn. It hadn’t been long before it was clear that the reason they were best suited to train with one another wasn’t that they were the two smallest future guardsmen, but because they were the best. 

They’d been lucky, when the time came for their first real assignments as guardsmen, to be sent out together. And they’d been even luckier when they’d met the rest of their troop, a handful of years ago which seem much longer now—to find friends in Sam and Clint and Maria and the others. Now it feels like there was never a time all of them hadn’t known one another or worked together almost as one body. 

But Steve still feels a special bond of kinship with Nat from those early days of being underestimated together—them against the world. 

Soon they’ve ridden far enough that they can’t see the turrets of the palace anymore for the trees, setting out over the hills where the weak sunlight still lingers, and the only sound is their horses’ hoofbeats and the calls of birds overhead. 

“So, your summons,” Natasha says at last, slowing her horse to a walk so that Steve can hear her without having to raise her voice. 

“To see Commander Phillips,” Steve confirms. 

“A promotion?” She asks. 

“Sort of.” 

“You’re leaving us,” she says, bluntly. 

“Looks that way.” 

“The prince?” 

Steve shoots Natasha a look, and she smiles, shaking her hair back over her shoulder. 

“It wasn’t that hard to guess. It’s just about the only thing on everyone’s mind at the moment,” she says. 

Steve snorts. “I guess I don’t have much to share then, but I still want whatever you know for your end of the deal.” 

“I don’t know everything Rogers, I just act like I do. Tell me first, about your meeting.” 

Steve sighs, not believing her, really. But he supposes fair is fair. 

“He’s being sent away. I don’t know where yet, but I’ve been assigned as his personal guard wherever it is. Doesn’t sound like there will be anyone else, so I assume it’s somewhere reasonably defensible enough, or they don’t really expect an attack like—like that. I’m not sure what they think I can do, to be honest with you. But I suppose he can’t go wherever it is alone.” 

Natasha nods, pursing her lips in thought. 

“Phillips said it’s a promotion in name, but that it’ll be tedious, “ he adds. “More or less anyway…maybe not in so many words.” 

“Phillips doesn’t use many words for anything,” Natasha says with a laugh. 

“The King and Queen and Prince all came into the room to meet with me, after he told me,” Steve says. 

That _does_ get a little noise of interest from her. 

“How did they look? I mean how did they seem?” she asks. 

“Tired. Worried.” 

“Hmm I’d imagine. And the Prince?”

“He seemed…subdued, I guess.” 

Steve isn’t sure yet _what_ to make of the prince’s affect this afternoon. He’d seemed…resigned, maybe. More so than his parents had, and less hopeful too. Like he didn’t really expect anything good any more. 

“Well,” Natasha says, slowly, “they’ve all known Alexander Pierce personally. As worried as everyone is who only knows him by reputation, anyone who’s had any dealings with the man himself ought to be smart enough to know it’s probably even worse than the rumors.” 

Steve’s stomach clenches, and he takes a deep breath. 

“Alright—then tell me. What have I gotten myself into?” 

“What do you want to hear? That you’ve traded in your field command to be a nanny?” 

“How about the truth?” Steve suggests, dryly. 

“Oh, that,” Natasha says, tossing her head. “There’s as many versions of truth as there are people to tell it, or haven’t you learned that yet?” 

“Tell me your version then,” Steve says, refusing to be sidetracked into a web of Natasha’s words. He’d learned early on that he couldn’t beat her at that game, even if she likes to play it with him when the mood strikes her. But usually ignoring her riddles and cutting to the heart of whatever they’re talking about as if he hadn’t noticed her trying to misdirect him eventually works. 

It does this time, anyway. Natasha laughs, settling herself in her saddle and losing her smirk to get down to business. 

“My version of truth—alright,” she says. “As far as most people are concerned, Alexander Pierce appeared one day on the streets of the royal city out of a cloud of magic, bearing in one hand the secrets of the universe, and in the other a kindly wisdom and desire to help all the world.” 

“And as far as you’re concerned?” 

Natasha snorts. “As far as I’m concerned, he crawled on his belly from the court of one of the northern barons, where they weren’t feeding him the steady diet of power and human hearts he needs to thrive. He made a name for himself at the university—because unfortunately his magical skill is not one of the mythical parts of his myth. He was handsome, and seemed benevolent, and happened to have enough knowledge of the north to offer precisely the advice most calculated to be of use to King George twenty years ago when a rebellion seemed to be stirring there.” She pauses. “And _if_ he was the one who set the wheels of that rebellion into motion whispering in the ear of the north before coming to the royal city to solve the problem he’d created—he was smart enough to cover his tracks.” 

“You know this for certain?” 

Natasha gives him a withering look. “You didn’t ask me for certainty, Steve, you asked me for truth.” 

“And they aren’t the same thing,” Steve says, wearily. 

“Not where magic and power and Pierce are concerned.” 

“Well I believe you—of course I do—but how does that get me to riding out of the gates into the unknown in two days time with the Crown Prince in exile?” 

“Ah, you ask me to abridge the epic tale of our times,” Natasha says, sadly. But Steve can hear the teasing in her tone. 

“I do, or the sun’s going to go down before you get around to this decade.” 

“Fine. Speculation aside, Pierce has been a close—maybe the closest—advisor to King George and Queen Winifred since he proved his worth to the kingdom twenty years ago. This you already knew. And there have been other stories over the years, when he slipped up maybe and showed his true face to the King. But nothing enough to cause a fall from his exalted position until this most recent. Here I admit to a small gap in my knowledge, no matter who I’ve plied for information. Maybe nobody knows but the King and Queen themselves. But some rift finally occurred between our beloved monarchs and their trusted friend which lost him that trust—and rather than see himself quietly demoted or distanced from the throne, Pierce made his exit into a spectacle befitting a madman who also happens to be a mage.” 

“I know. I heard of his—banishment.” 

Natasha gives a derisive little snort. “I suppose you could call it that. But from what I can gather he arrived in the King’s assembly and spelled the room so that no one could speak, then proclaimed that the Barnes royal line and rule was at an end—that the kingdom will fall, and that he, Pierce, would see that the poison that would kill it would be his, and he’d use the Crown Prince to deliver it. At that point, the Prince, who was seated beside his father, collapsed, and Pierce made his exit—this time really in a cloud of magic. At _that_ point everyone could speak again and the King managed to tell the empty space he’d left that was banished and not to return—but I think he’d gotten the message already.” 

Steve shakes his head, trying to imagine the chaos of the scene. Hearing what had really happened, he’s surprised actually at how little of it had made it into the palace rumor mill. He’d heard enough to guess at some of it, but it’s worse than the whispers managed to convey. 

“The mages at the university—do they know yet exactly what kind of magic he cast? Or what it’s actually meant to do?” 

Natasha shakes her head. “No, not so far as I can find out. Which is frightening enough in itself because I think if they knew anything they’d want everyone to hear about it, which I gather to mean they’re just as lost as anyone.” 

“And the prince,” Steve says, slowly, “they don’t know what it means that Pierce fixed his attention on him?” 

“I’ve heard that after that day he began to have…troubling dreams. But that’s all.” 

“Dreams seem like a murky reason to send him away,” Steve says. 

“Everything about magic is murky, unfortunately for us all,” Natasha says, lightly. But her face is serious. 

“I’m not sure,” Steve says, “that I know any more from all of that than I did half an hour ago.” 

Natasha smiles at him, wryly. “Sorry. Truth is just about as murky as magic, both about as useful as the other.” 

“You are a cynic, Romanoff.” 

“I’m a northerner. We learned a long time ago from people like Pierce that there’s few enough things you can count on as certain in this world.” 

Steve rubs at the crease between his eyebrows, his face feeling stiff with frowning through Natasha’s tale, and sighs. 

“On my very short list of certain things, Steve, your name _would_ be there,” Natasha says, an odd note in her voice. “If it makes you feel better, I believe they chose the right man for this job, if such a man exists.” 

It occurs to Steve that the strange quality in Natasha’s tone might be sincerity—and his throat tightens at a rare glimpse of unshielded sentiment from his enigmatic friend. He hasn’t had time yet, since leaving Phillip’s study, to feel anything much about the task ahead of him—but now he feels both fear and hope clashing inside him. 

He wishes he knew exactly what it was that’s going to be asked of him—what it will take to do well at this. He supposes he’ll learn, in the coming days. Until then he just has to do his best with what’s directly in front of him. 

“We’ll be assigned an escort, I think. To take us wherever we’re going,” Steve says, as they both turn their horses back in the direction of the palace in worldless agreement. “I’m going to ask Phillips if it can be our troop.” 

Natasha nods. “He’ll give Sam the command, once you’re gone?” 

“I think he’s the right one for it, don’t you?” 

“Without question, he’d be a fool not to.” 

“He’ll do well,” Steve hums, thinking. “I just hope it’s not so easy a transition that you all don’t miss me, at least a little— _ow!_ ” 

Natasha has smacked him on the back of the head, and he rubs at the spot, glaring at her. 

“ _You_ are the fool if you think we won’t,” she says. 

“ A fool for you, always,” Steve shoots back, grinning. He’d by lying if he said he wouldn’t hope they’d be a _bit_ disappointed to lose him, and it’s nice to have it confirmed. 

“Come on Rogers,” Natasha says, nudging her heels into her horse’s flank to push the mare into a canter, “I’m sure they’ll be ready to feast in your honor, and bask in your presence while we’ve got it.” 

Steve nudges his horse to keep up with her, and raises his voice to say, “They’re always ready to feast in whoever’s honor gives them an excuse.” 

Natasha grins at him, rising a little in her saddle, and Steve prepares himself to kick Ember into a full run. 

“And tonight it’s yours—don’t be late!” 

At that, Natasha sends her mount shooting forward, stretching herself out low over its silky neck, and Steve laughs as he tears after her, trying not to fall _too_ far behind. 

They do eat well that night, as Natasha had predicted. And Steve savors up the time with his friends as best he can—but he can’t quite keep the shadow of tomorrow and the day after that from his mind. 

To Steve, magic has always been a small, gentle thing, something his mother had wielded like soft words in morning light, or spring rain and a healing touch. 

He has a feeling that it’s past time he made his acquaintance with what magic might mean when it’s a poisoned knife. 

Steve hopes he’s ready to meet it when he does.

***


	3. Into Exile

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky rides with Captain Rogers into exile.

Bucky does very little to oversee the packing of his things ahead of his trip to god-knows-where. 

It’s not like him, and he knows that the servants, not to mention his mother and sister, have noticed his lack of attention to his wardrobe and amenities. He’s always been particular about that kind of thing in the past, careful about how he dresses himself. But he just can’t bring himself to care. 

There won’t be anyone else to notice much, if those who take on the task pack the wrong things, anyway. Just him and Steve—no, Captain Rogers, he thinks, dully, he’s not a little boy any more—and whatever small number of servants this new home is staffed with. 

He doesn’t think the Captain will take much notice of his appearance, not with his attention turned toward potential threats—or whatever he thinks awaits him on this assignment. 

Bucky is uncomfortably certain that his new guard hasn’t fully realized that the thing he most needs to keep Bucky safe from is Bucky. Well—he’ll learn. Hopefully the lesson won’t be too hard won, whenever it happens. 

Bucky remembers Captain Rogers—Steve—from the years after they’d first met, such as it was, when Bucky had been aware of him as a boy so close to his own age also growing up in the palace, but living such a different kind of existence to his own. He’s grown tall and strong from the scrawny urchin Bucky remembers from back then—and he’s clearly done well for himself, as a captain, and as the singular Guardsman both Phillips and his parents trust enough to give him this assignment. They wouldn’t have chosen just anybody. Still, while Bucky knows logically that they must have selected him for his loyalty and skill, the illogical part of him can’t help but feel like the choice was made to remind him exactly of how wrong his own life has gone. Steve—Captain Rogers—had grown up as his parallel, and clearly all of _his_ ambitions and expectations had proved out. Nothing about this is where Bucky had thought his life would lead. 

He almost feels bad for the Captain, in as much as he can feel bad for anyone in this situation other than himself at this moment. Now that their lives have gone from parallel to pointedly intersecting, Bucky feels almost as if it’s because his own life has taken such an unhappy turn that he’s now knocking Steve’s off course too. 

It’s certainly not the promotion he might have otherwise hoped for as he’d climbed the ranks, to be sent into exile along with an unpredictable charge. 

Still. Captain Rogers may soon find himself confronting the unfortunate realities of dark magic, but the curse itself is all Bucky’s. He doesn’t have the room in his tangle of a mind at the moment to worry himself over more than that. 

He sleeps very little the night before they leave. Two hours before dawn is really barely after his usual bedtime anyway, at least in the past, when he spent his time enjoying himself with friends late into the night. Lately, it’s just because he hardly sleeps at all for fear of what his dreams will bring, staying awake until his body absolutely forces him into unconsciousness. 

So it feels a bit like a dream, when he dresses in the flickering light of his fire, preparing himself for a long ride in the darkness. It feels like he’s sleepwalking as he follows a page with a lighted lamp down the winding corridors toward the southern gate. But it’s a benign kind of dreaming, if it is a dream, and those are hard to come by these days. 

There’s a full complement of the Guard assembled in the courtyard when he descends, and Bucky snorts to himself. It makes it all seem very official, when the reality is that they’ll be leaving him alone when they reach their destination. His safehaven, or his prison, as the case remains to be seen. 

His eyes find Captain Rogers at the head of the line of soldiers, his hand on his horse’s bridle as he strokes its nose, murmuring to it. He’s wearing his full armor today, and it makes him look even taller and broader than he had in his usual clothes—which was already quite tall and quite broad, as anyone with eyes would agree. 

He looks up just at that moment, finding Bucky’s eyes in the firelit courtyard, and nods, once. 

Bucky looks away, finding a groom at his side, holding the reins to his own mount. 

Bucky takes the reins from the man, who hovers uncertainly for a moment, as if Bucky might need a hand up into the saddle like a child. Bucky ignores him, taking a moment to stroke his hands over his horse’s soft neck. The smell of saddle-leather and hay is grounding, and Jacinth nudges his big nose into Bucky’s stomach, snuffling at his pockets for anything edible. Bucky laughs softly, wrapping his arm around the horse’s large nose and stroking his silky ears. It’s comforting to remember he’ll have at least _one_ friend with him for this. 

The groom clears his throat again, reappearing at Bucky’s elbow, and Bucky looks up to see that the rest of the guard are busily mounting their horses, and the man in charge of the small supply wagon has climbed up onto the seat, getting ready to depart. 

Bucky sighs. He almost wishes he hadn’t told his parents and Rebecca so forcefully that he didn’t want to say goodbye to them here. They’d had their final meal together last night as a family—and that had been good. Better, he thinks, than trying to hug them one more time in this courtyard, with all of the pomp and circumstance and added drama that would come from them being here and everyone having to dance around them as they tried to do their jobs. But he feels very small, the only one not in a uniform that marks him as a part of something, someone with a job to do. 

He smooths a hand down front of his soft, black leather jerkin, and shakes his head. It’s for the best. 

But as he hoists himself up into Jacinth’s saddle, he notices a small rustling amongst the guard, and sees everyone’s eyes directed up toward the wall of the palace. 

He turns to follow their gaze, and sees a length of bright white silk fluttering manically from one of the slitted windows. He squints, and the arm attached to the scarf lifts a candle so that he can make out Becca’s pale face, waving the scarf at him. She’s smiling, but her cheeks are shiny with tears, and Bucky feels his own eyes prickling, and his chest tightens. 

Around him, there’s an uncomfortable murmur that passes between the assembled servants and guards as they recognize the Crown Princess. The grooms and stablehands, with their feet on the ground, make the customary bows, but Bucky can see the guardsmen and women looking uncertain. They’re already mounted, and in full gear there’s no way to make the usual show of respect. 

It’s Captain Rogers who makes a move first, rising in his stirrups and placing one gloved hand over the breastplate of his armor and inclining his head toward her. It’s not a customary gesture, but it communicates what it needs to, and the rest of the gathered soldiers do the same. Bucky smiles weakly, and turns his own head back toward Becca, placing his hand over his heart, too. She gives him a wide, watery smile, and he brings his hand from his heart and presses it gently to his lips.

Becca blows him a kiss, and Bucky waves one more time before turning Jacinth toward the gate. 

Then the ranks of the guards form a column around him and Jacinth, setting him at the middle. When he looks back over his shoulder as the grooms shut the heavy gates behind him, he can still see the white scarf waving from the grey stone wall. 

They push the horses hard for the first few, cool hours before the sun has truly risen, at which point they rest, pausing for water and a simple, uncooked breakfast. When they take to the trail again it’s at a steadier pace, as the warmth of a spring morning begins to seep into the landscape around them. 

The guards around Bucky shift position throughout the ride, though his own location doesn’t change—trapped squarely in between two on either side and one in front and back of Jacinth. They’re quiet when they ride beside him, and it causes him a small pang of jealousy when someone who’d ridden beside him for an hour without a word moves back up the line only to break into a grin, talking and joking with their new neighbor. 

He knows it’s out of deference to their stations…but it still feels lonely. His isolation already taking effect, even if he isn’t truly alone yet. 

It’s after another brief rest to stretch and eat lunch beside a stream when Steve guides his horse to fall in beside Bucky. He’s quiet, too, looking pointedly forward long enough for Bucky to give up on getting any conversation out of him either. But then, to Bucky’s surprise, he looks over with a small smile, and asks, 

“Do you recognize where we are yet?” 

Bucky’s eyes widen and he peers into the trees on either side of the trail, as if he might recognize one of them. 

“No, should I?” He asks. 

The Captain shrugs, his mail shirt whispering with the motion over his shoulders. 

“I don’t know. I think you’ve seen it, the place we’re headed. But I didn’t know if you’d remember.” 

Bucky’s mouth tugs down a little in annoyance. He forgot that Steve would know their destination before he did. 

“Any treehouse I had as a child would probably have been more conveniently located,” Bucky says, peevishly. 

Captain Rogers, to his surprise, flashes him a smile. 

“True,” is all he says. 

He doesn’t speak again, but Bucky begins to look around them with a bit more curiosity. He hadn’t thought that he might know the place, but he scans the woods and meadows they pass now with more interest, trying to remember if any of it is familiar. 

“Aren’t there any towns or villages, in this part of the country?” Bucky asks after a while. 

Steve glances sideways at him. “There are. On the other side of this wood, we’re surrounded by farmland. But not on this road—we’re meant to avoid them. You’re…recognizable. And secrecy is the better part of security today, I think.” 

“Oh,” Bucky says, vaguely. He supposes that makes sense. 

It’s only a little while later, as they come over the crest of a small hill looking down into a sheltered valley that he says “ _Oh_ ,” again, this time in a tone of recognition. 

The sun is hanging low in the afternoon sky, yellowing the bright green hillsides of the valley, into which is nestled a gleaming white house, encircled by a high, equally gleaming white wall nearly the length of the valley itself. 

He _does_ know this place, though he wouldn’t have remembered it to think of it without the sight to jog his memory. 

He’d visited it once, as a child, staying a night within the walls with his family as they’d made their way across the kingdom for some reason or another. 

It’s a smallish royal residence, not in any kind of regular use any more. The story his father had told him was that it had been built by Bucky’s grandfather for his grandmother during a time of war with their neighbors to the east. It had been meant to be a safehaven for her, a little bubble of peace where she could walk freely in her garden without the retinue of guards that the war had made necessary to have if she was in the palace or the royal city, for fear of an attempt on her life. It was built not to be found, and it makes sense now why there was a road to it that managed not to pass by anything that roads in this kingdom are generally created to connect. It’s not meant for passersby to know this is here. 

Since that war had ended, this kingdom had known many years of peace, and the royal family had been able to live happily and comfortably in the palace without needing any kind of walled garden to keep them in relative safety. Bucky wonders what kind of shape the house might be in after these years of disuse—as far as he knows the last time it was visited was the family’s one night here nearly fifteen years ago. And he’d been a child, too, and wouldn’t have taken notice if it had been in poor repair even then.

Bucky squints as they begin their descent toward it, trying to make out the house through the tangle of garden behind the white walls. Soon though, they’ve followed the road low enough that all he can see is the white stone of the walls, looming higher and higher as they approach. 

The two guards at the head of their column leap nimbly down from their horses as they reach the soaring wooden gates, a red-haired woman and a dark-skinned man he’d watched Captain Rogers laughing with earlier in the day. 

Together they lift the heavy wooden beam across the front of them—and Bucky notes that it’s strange to see gates which bar from the outside. But they wait, not pushing them open, until the gates swing aside on their own, and Bucky can see that a man and woman in simple clothing stand on the inside having lifted an identical bar from within, and Bucky realizes these gates are meant to be opened only when those on _both_ sides agree to it. The red-haired woman waves the supply wagon through, and the rest of them stay in saddle for a few more minutes, waiting. 

Jacinth shuffles a little under Bucky, restless and impatient, and Bucky doesn’t have it in him to quiet his mount when he feels the same. 

But eventually, the guard who’d driven the wagon comes back out between the gates, now riding newly saddled cart-horse, the cart evidently having been left inside. 

Captain Rogers nudges his horse gently into motion, glancing over his shoulder at Bucky, who tugs on Jacinth’s reins to follow. 

Steve pauses beside the gate, leaning down to clasp hands with the red-haired guardswoman, and then the man, saying something low enough to him that Bucky can’t hear, and Bucky looks carefully away, pretending that he wasn’t trying to. 

Then he disappears inside the gates, and Bucky takes a deep, steadying breath to follow him. 

As soon as they’re inside, the man and woman close the two heavy leaves of the gate, lowering the beam with a dull thud into its brackets. Bucky can just hear the sound of the outside beam being dropped into place on the other side. 

Captain Rogers drops, lightly for someone wearing plate armor and mail, from his saddle, and Bucky moves much more stiffly to do the same. It’s been a long time since the last day that he spent this many hours in the saddle. 

The stout, kind-faced woman reaches for the reins of Steve’s horse, and as Bucky turns from the stirrup he finds the angular old man holding his hand out to take Jacinth’s. 

Steve steps forward beside Bucky, and the man and drops his head in a clumsy half-bow while the woman performs an equally encumbered impression of a curtsy. 

“Your majesty, sir,” says the man, in a slightly roughened village accent. “I’m Thomas, and this is my wife Matilda. We’ll be looking after you.” 

“And our daughter, Agnes. She’s up at the house seeing to your things,” adds Matilda “She’s a quiet girl, and won’t trouble you.” 

They both look at Bucky, expecting him to say something, but he’s suddenly weary down to his very bones, and his skull feels like its filled with feather-down. 

Captain Rogers shifts slightly on his feet, and then places a hand on Bucky’s shoulder—and Bucky thinks he should find it constricting, or overly familiar, but instead it grounds him a little, and he finds himself wishing Steve would keep it there, direct him where he’s supposed to go so that he doesn’t have to think anymore for a little while. 

“Thank you both,” Steve says. “Is it—we’ve been traveling some time. Are things ready for us—to rest?” 

Matilda nods, and Bucky notices that she’s eyeing him keenly, maybe trying to decide what to make of his silence. He looks at Thomas, but the older man’s face gives away nothing like the curiosity in Matilda’s. Thomas, Bucky decides, is a man who keeps his thoughts to himself. He wonders if that’s how they got this job—or if this position is considered more of a chore than an honor. After all, they’re locked in too. 

“We’ve been here a week, making preparations. We knew you would be tired,” Matilda says, still giving Bucky that measuring look. After a moment she seems to come to a decision, and steps toward Thomas, holding out the reins to Steve’s horse. “Thomas can handle both of the horses,” she says, turning now with free hands toward Bucky, and with one plump, work-worn hand she pats him on the cheek, and with the other she grasps one of his. “You come to the house darling, you need food and a bed.” 

Bucky freezes for a moment, surprised by the unexpected touch—in the palace, a person in a serving position would never touch one of the royal family without express permission. But Matilda smiles, and she doesn’t look anything at all like his mother, but it’s a motherly smile anyway, and Bucky suddenly, absurdly, thinks that he might cry. 

He squeezes her hand, and she squeezes back, and Bucky lets her pull him gently toward the white stucco walls and little peaked roofs of the house, the Captain trailing behind. 

***

Matilda, despite her first hour of motherly bossing, disappears quietly after installing Bucky and Steve into their apartments on the second floor of the little house. 

It’s not the chamber Bucky remembers from his childhood, but he thinks it’s probably the one in which his parents slept—it’s large and well-appointed, if a little outdated in its furnishings. Everything in it, barring anything else, is aggressively clean. Steve’s room, he sees only as Matilda points him toward the door, is on the other side of the floor, and in between is a large sitting room and area for dining. 

Matilda makes sure that the fires in all three of the rooms are built up high, and that they see the dinner laid for them on the table, and then she vanishes for the night. Thomas they don’t see again, and the daughter remains known to them in name only. 

Steve stands at one end of the long dining table, closest to his door, his hands resting on the back of one of the high chairs, looking at Bucky. Bucky hovers for a few moments, undecided. In the end, Bucky quails at the idea of sitting across from him at this table tonight, trying to make conversation while his mind and heart catch up to the idea that this is going to be his home and his life for the foreseeable future. It scares him more than the thought of falling asleep does, and that’s an unusual feeling these days. 

So he shrugs a shoulder at Steve, filling a napkin with a few pieces of bread and fruit and cheese, and then says, 

“I’m going to go…rest. I think.” 

The Captain nods, “It’s been a long day.” 

Bucky nods his agreement, even though the dark outside of the windows has barely fallen. 

“Goodnight, then,” he says, awkwardly, turning his back on the captain. 

“Goodnight,” he hears behind him, softly, as if Steve doesn’t expect him to hear. 

***

Bucky sleeps well that night, to his shock and gratitude, unbroken by dreams of any kind. He hasn’t had that many hours of sleep all in a row since Pierce left the palace, and he almost doesn’t know what’s happening when he blinks awake to morning sunshine. 

Somehow, between being fully rested for the first time in weeks, and the bubbling return of the curiosity he couldn’t muster last night, he almost feels—hopeful. 

The breakfast laid on the table is simple, almost what he’d consider coarse if he were at home, but the bread is fresh and the early spring tangerines sharp and just sweet enough to wake him up. 

The Captain doesn’t seem to be in the apartments, but then, Bucky supposes he’s used to rising early. 

Bucky carries one of the tangerines with him, peeling it delicately as he trots back down the narrow staircase and out of the front doors of the house into the sunshine. 

The first impression that hits him, now that he’s really looking, is of a lush overgrown riot spreading around on either side of the house, down the length of the high walls as far as he can see from the vantage point of the broad front steps. He can tell that there was order in it, once—he can see what must have been tidy rows of fruit trees, now grown up around with tall weeds, and he can make out a pattern of rose bushes, and the half fallen stone walls of flower beds amongst the tangle of unchecked growth. But not everything is the worse for wear, as far as he can tell—there’s a scent of blossoms in the air, and he can see the lacy edges of white flowers on some of the trees which promise fruit later in the season. 

He descends the stairs, wandering a little further on the gravel path into the explosion of greenery, and then stops. 

Steve is sitting on a low stone bench between a haphazard and overgrown pair of roses, his head bowed over a book. 

He looks up when he hears Bucky’s crunching footsteps, snapping the cover shut at once, and leaping to stand at attention. 

“Your highness, apologies. I didn’t realize you were awake,” he says, a little stiffly. 

Bucky swallows a tart mouthful of tangerine, and tosses the peels carelessly off into the grass before stepping forward. 

“Only just,” he says, and the other man nods, quickly. 

“What are you reading?” Bucky asks. 

Captain Rogers’ cheeks flare pink, and his eyes dart down to the book in his hand. 

“I’m sorry,” he says again, “I borrowed it from our—from the library in the sitting room. I hope that’s alright.” 

Bucky gives him a crooked, wry smile. “I have a feeling you and I both are going to have a lot of time on our hands here—and it’s your home as much as mine. Take what you like.” 

The Captain ducks his head, and Bucky wonders briefly if that sentiment didn’t sound quite how he’d meant it. 

Bucky takes another tentative step forward. “You don’t have to stand for me, either. I don’t think palace ceremony is much use to us out here—or it isn’t to me, at least.” 

Steve looks up again and gives him another little nod, stepping back to sit on the bench, this time to one side of it. 

“Thank you, your highness.” 

Bucky hesitates another moment, and then steps forward, dropping into the seat beside Steve, looking back over the path toward the house beside him. 

“You don’t have to do that, either,” he says, after a moment. “In fact…do you think—maybe—you could call me by name?” 

He glances sideways at Bucky, his face unreadable. “James?” 

Bucky chews his lip, and then decides, in for a penny, in for a pound. “Bucky. My—friends—call me Bucky.” He looks sideways now at Steve too, meeting his eyes. “It’s just…I don’t really like the idea of no one calling me by my name again, as long as I’m here. And I doubt I’d convince Matilda or Thomas.” 

Steve gives him a close, small smile, a line creasing his eyebrows. 

“Steve,” he says, finally, having come to an apparent decision. “If you’re…Bucky…I should be Steve.” 

Bucky smiles, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. “I remember.” 

Bucky looks back over his shoulder, and sees that Steve’s eyebrows have raised toward his hairline in surprise. 

“Do you?” Steve asks, curiously. 

Bucky nods. “Of course. I haven’t had so many chastise me with that much force that I’d forget it.” 

Steve laughs, low in his throat, and leans forward on his own elbows beside Bucky. 

“Your—friend—called you Bucky then, too,” he says. “It’s why I didn’t realize you were…you know.” 

Bucky grins, “I hadn’t got so vain about wearing my circlet then either.” 

Steve’s eyes flick up to Bucky’s hair, where his customary golden circle of coronet is conspicuously absent from his forehead today. A muscle twitches in Steve’s jaw. 

“No. Not so much velvet then, either. Or maybe it was just the mud.” 

Bucky laughs, smoothing his hands over the soft green of his breeches over his thighs. He hadn’t really discovered the joys of clothing until his teen years, when he’d leapt into the rich benefits of a royal wardrobe with a vengeance—he barely owns a scrap of clothing that isn’t a brightly dyed linen, or velvet, or embroidered to within an inch of its life. 

“I wish…” Bucky begins, a thought striking him quickly enough that he doesn’t think before he voices it, “that we might have become friends then. Then we wouldn’t have to begin with all this.” 

He ducks his head, a little embarrassed at the sentiment and presumption that they are starting anything like friendship now, and the mild surprise on Steve’s face. 

“I didn’t stay friends,” he adds, suddenly feeling it’s important that Steve knows this, “with that boy who hit you.” 

“Oh,” Steve says. 

“I know I can be an insufferable snob,” Bucky adds, pressing the issue, “but I don’t like people who think their title means they can do whatever they want to anyone who hasn’t got one.” 

Steve gives him a measuring look, meeting his eyes boldly. “Are you? An insufferable snob?” 

Bucky laughs, and then looks away, self-conscious. “I don’t know—I was just being self-deprecating to win you over. But probably.” He looks around the courtyard, gaze aimless. “Maybe I won’t be, here though. The rules are different now, aren’t they? About who I have to—get to be.” 

He cringes a little internally at his first choice of words, as if _having_ to be a prince has been so hard that it’s something to complain about. Steve may have agreed to given names, but he doesn’t think their nascent friendship stretches that far across the divide in their experiences yet for Steve to be sympathetic to the privileged trials of being royalty. 

“True,” Steve says. “Maybe you don’t have to be anything, here. If we’re both exiles, maybe at least we can decide whatever else that might mean.” 

“Exiles,” Bucky hums, thoughtfully. Steve twitches uncomfortably beside him, and Bucky can see that his face has gone red in embarrassment at his too-honest word choice. Bucky smiles at him, so that he knows Bucky doesn’t disagree, or at least isn’t angry at him for calling this what it is. “Maybe so.” 

He wonders if Steve feels like this is a punishment, or like he’s the unfortunate side-effect of the king and queen’s loving banishment of their son. Again, he has the suspicion that his own veering life path has knocked Steve’s rather further off course than Steve had anticipated. Steve is looking down pointedly at his hands, clasped tightly now in his lap. 

Bucky reaches out, and pats him on the shoulder to let him know it’s alright, at least as far as Bucky is concerned. Then he stands. 

“I’m going to roam, a little,” he says, fixing his eyes on a barely visible hint of a path leading deeper into the messy garden. “You should keep reading, if you want.” 

“I—alright,” Steve says, and Bucky can tell from the coiled tension of his body that he’s just resisting the urge to stand in Bucky’s presence again. “Thank you, highn—Bucky.” 

The name comes out a little awkwardly, but it’s still nice to hear it, and Bucky beams at Steve to thank him for his effort. After a moment, Steve smiles back. 

Bucky picks his way carefully through the tangle, but he still has to unhook himself from the clutches of grasping thorns now and then. Along a sunny stretch of the white outer wall he finds a vibrant spill of flowers—daffodils that look like fallen sunshine, and tall purple irises leaning toward the shade of the nearest fruit tree. He wades off the track into the overgrowth toward them, and before he thinks about it, he’s collected an armful of them, his nose filling with the sharp green scent of freshly cut stalks. 

He sniffs thoughtfully at them, as he starts picking his way back toward the house. He’s always loved flowers. After the incident in the kitchen gardens all those years ago, his mother had had a section of the palace gardens built up just for him—so that his future desires to play in the mud wouldn’t be in the way of the palace kitchen staff again. He’d been proud of it, and chosen everything that grew in it himself—though mostly his efforts had been those of a hands-off supervisor, directing palace gardeners to plant his choices for him, and visiting only when they were in bloom, tended by someone else. Every once in a while he’d wanted to get his hands dirty, spending a morning or an afternoon mucking around pulling weeds until he was tired of it, and then leaving again with the assurance that someone else would finish the task. 

He spots Matilda, as he comes around the edge of the house, her arms full of firewood, her round face red with exertion in the quickly warming day. 

“Matilda!” He calls to her, and she turns, looking uncomfortably down at her armload, clearly preventing her from curtsying. Bucky waves his hand at her not to bother, and her face clears a little. 

“May I help you, your majesty?” She asks. 

“No you—you’re busy. I was just thinking…a vase? But maybe I can find it myself…” he trails off, uncertain about where he’d even look for such a thing. This is off his usual script—when he’d picked flowers in his own palace plot, there’d always been some eager person on hand following him around, taking them away to arrange them and have them sent to his rooms. But he thinks he wouldn’t mind doing this himself, if she told him how. 

Matilda gives him a long look, hitching up the firewood in her arms to prevent it from falling. Finally she says, “Of course. I’ll show you where to look, if you’ll follow me around back.” 

Bucky nods eagerly, and follows in her wake around the back of the house, looking around with interest. Here there is no aesthetically pleasing design, everything is tidy but obviously organized for use—including a little garden of herbs, and a slightly larger plot for vegetables, and various pieces of equipment for things Bucky probably wouldn’t recognize even if someone explained to him what they did. In the palace, all of these sorts of rooms exist in their own wing, with no reason for any of the royal family to trespass in them, impeding the hive of busy work that makes the palace run efficiently. He feels like he’s seeing a secret that he’s not supposed to, somehow. 

But Matilda leads him straight into the well-scrubbed kitchen, dropping her firewood in a stack beside the massive open hearth of the fireplace at one end. 

She brushes off her hands, and bustles over to a set of high shelves, stacked carefully with dishes. Bucky trails after her, and she points to the highest shelf, where he can see a row of vases, a little dusty with disuse. 

“Any of these that please you, your majesty. You’re welcome to use them whenever you like.” 

Bucky nods, like this is something he does all the time. But then he bites his lip, looking around. 

“Um…water? And er—scissors, maybe?” He asks, uncertainly. 

Matilda gives him a funny look, with a small, wry smile. But she very gently points out the pump handled sink basin, and shows him a drawer with kitchen tools that she invites him to use as he needs. 

Bucky sets his flowers on the counter, and begins industriously trimming the stems, arranging them into one of the vases with maybe a bit more enthusiasm than skill—somehow when the palace staff took away whatever he’d collected, they always managed to deliver them to his bedroom in an artistic bouquet, no matter what all he’d handed off to them. He wonders, suddenly and uncomfortably, if they’d gone out after he left and chosen better stems, and he’d just never noticed that the final product was much better selected than what he’d happily pointed to. But even if it doesn’t look quite so nice, he admires his work—it’s cheery and colorful at least, and he’d done it himself. 

“Matilda,” he says, as he carefully nudged a tilting iris to stand up straight where he wants it. 

“Your majesty?” Matilda asks, already whisking away the cut and rejected pieces of plant detritus from the wooden table. 

“Is there—the garden seems like it hasn’t been tended in some time.” 

Matilda pauses, hand on her hip, her mouth twisting. 

“I’m afraid there aren’t enough hands for it, your majesty. With just Thomas and Agnes and I, there’s only time enough to keep the kitchen garden for meals.” 

Bucky blushes, feeling guilty. “Of course, I know you must be very busy…” he trails off, thinking. “Would you—could _I_ tend to—to the flowers?” 

Matilda again gives him that funny, indulgent little smile, and Bucky realizes that he must sound like a child. He straightens his shoulders, trying to look less uncertain. 

Matilda nods, wiping her hands on her apron. “Of course, I’d be happy to show you where the gardening things are, just as you please.” 

“Yes, thank you,” Bucky says, “if you can just show me where to find a—a shovel, and—and the other things.” 

He makes a face again at his inability to quite remember what would even be needed for the endeavor, and Matilda looks away quickly, and Bucky’s sure she’s covering a grin. So maybe he has no idea what he’s doing—but the garden is going to seed anyway, he reasons, so even if he mucks things up it doesn’t seem like anyone will really mind. He might as well try. 

She shows him to a small outbuilding, and leaves him to look over the well-stocked—if slightly rusty—rows of tools and baskets of dormant bulbs, some labeled and some not. There’s cobwebs hanging in the corners, and he gets one stuck in his hair, but by the time she comes out to call him in for lunch, Bucky thinks he’s made at least decent progress in sorting the items that he actually thinks he can figure out how to use. 

It occurs to him, as he makes his way up the stairs of the house to their sitting room, following the heady scent of soup, that he hasn’t thought about what he would be doing at home in at least two hours. 

He considers it, wondering if he’s just in a sort of self-protective denial. It’s Thursday, which means that he’d normally be sitting with his father and Rebecca in the Lower Court, hearing cases of merchants cheated by their suppliers, of tenants asking for intervention with their landowners, and so on. His father would ask him, after each, for his opinion, and he wouldn’t have one even if he tried his best to listen and make a fair judgment—and then his father would turn to Becca, who would make a recommendation which in retrospect seemed to be the only just solution, but that somehow Bucky would never have been able to think of on his own. 

He looks at the white vase in the windowsill beside the dining table as he seats himself for lunch, at the haphazard collection of purple and yellow, and realizes that he doesn’t wish he was there. 

It’s not everything—not when the real reason Bucky finds himself with the time for picking flowers and the freedom to arrange them himself is still a dark cloud hovering at the back of his mind—but it is something. 

And that’s good enough for today. 

***


	4. Fruitful Days and Restless Nights

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the garden, their days take on a routine. Their nights do too, though the pattern of _them_ brings Steve more worries than he cares to admit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for all your comments so far, it's been so nice to hear that you are enjoying this story!! 
> 
> In this chapter we are getting into some of what I was really excited to write as Steve and Bucky take on the challenge of the overgrown garden. It's also funny to me that I wrote this before quarantine started, because it was really a prediction of how I'd end up spending a lot of my OWN time these days. 
> 
> Anywho, [@inflomora](https://twitter.com/inflomora_art) and [I](https://twitter.com/odetteandodile) are both on twitter and have been sharing pics of our gardening attempts, so if you too have become a plant person in exile, you should come show us what you've been growing, in honor of Prince Bucky :)

Steve watches, without comment, with some surprise as the Crown Prince betakes himself the next morning into the garden. 

He’s not sure what he expected—but it wasn’t this, he knows that. Steve supposes he hadn’t had time to form many expectations of any kind, since he’d had only two brief days after being informed of this new assignment to settle things with his squadron and pack his things to prepare for the trip. But if he _had_ had time to think about how they both were going to spend their days in this haven-prison, he would have anticipated that Bucky would spend it looking more like he had in Commander Phillips chambers—pale, and wan, and unhappy about it all. 

Instead, on only their second morning, Steve steps down from their chambers to find Bucky knelt beside the stone bench where they’d sat together the day before, humming softly to himself, his hands full of uprooted weeds. He’s already made good progress, and Steve can see the feet of the bench, and more of the rosebuds on the climbing vines that arch over it, now clear of weeds. 

It’s a funny, incongruous sight. Bucky is still dressed in his rich clothes, the knees of his blue velvet breeches soaked through and grass-stained, and his white linen shirt sticking to his neck and shoulders with sweat. He’s still not wearing his coronet, but he has his hair braided around his head today, and it’s enough of a crown that Steve thinks that Bucky doesn’t need the gold to look like who he is. 

He thinks, briefly, about what Bucky had said about wishing they had been friends before now. He’s still not sure how to take that—or how to feel about the fact that even if the thought would _never_ have occurred to him as a child, thinking about it now he almost wishes the same. He wonders what it would have been like, if such a thing would ever have been possible without the strangeness of these forced circumstances to bring it about.

Suddenly, Bucky sits up straight, grasping at his hand and swearing loudly, and Steve leaps forward without thinking. 

“Are you alright?” He says, crouching swiftly at Bucky’s side. 

Bucky looks around, a little surprised, but his expression is mostly rueful as he holds his left hand in his right. 

Bucky’s mouth twists, and he holds out his hand so Steve can see the angry red welts rising across the back of it and up his wrist, and Bucky gestures at the green in front of him. 

“Must be a nettle or—or something,” Bucky says. He looks down at it, frowning, and adds, seemingly to himself, “I dint’t think of that.” 

Steve finds himself, unaccountably, fighting to suppress a smile, and he settles to his knees beside Bucky. 

“Let me see?” 

Bucky gives him his hand with a sigh, and Steve inspects the rash, flicking his eyes toward the plants in front of them. 

“Yes—here,” he says, pointing toward the spiky shoots of nettle he can see threaded through the clover. He scans around them, looking for the broad heart-shaped leaves of…“Here,” he says, plucking a handful of dock. Steve twists to apply it to Bucky’s wrist, along the path that the nettle had angered. 

“Oh!” Bucky says, looking up into Steve’s face with surprise. “That—that helps. It doesn’t sting so bad.” 

“Dock-leaf,” Steve says, smiling, showing Bucky where another clump of it is growing beside his knee. “It counteracts the nettle sting. Better remember what it looks like—seems like you might need it again.”

“Thank you,” Bucky says, a smile spreading over his face, and adds, laughing, “I think I most need to find some gloves.” 

Steve grins back, releasing Bucky’s hand, which he realizes he’s still holding. “That would help too.” 

Bucky looks bemusedly down at the mess in front of him. “Can’t believe this garden is already betraying me like this, when all I’m trying to do is help.” 

“Plants have minds of their own about what’s good for them,” Steve says, sitting back and brushing the green off of his hands. “Nettles happen to be of the mind that they want to grow wherever they want, and they have a nasty way of telling you off if you disagree.” 

“Fair enough,” Bucky says, shooting him a grin. “How do you know about the dock, anyway? Seems like there’s a secret manual for all this that no one has offered me yet, I wish I knew where to find it on our bookshelves—I’m a better reader than I am a gardener, at this point anyway.” 

Steve chuckles. “Anyone who’s ever had to sleep rough in the spring learns about how to sooth a nettle sting quick enough. So you can forgive yourself for not knowing—since I don’t think that description has ever applied to you.” 

“I suppose,” Bucky says, thoughtfully, trailing his fingers over a rosebud, an edge of pink petals peeking out of its green sheath. “Seems like there’s a lot of secrets this garden is keeping from me though, I doubt that’s the last.” 

“My mother is a hedge witch,” Steve says, surprising himself by offering the information, and Bucky looks at him, expression curious. Steve shrugs. “I only mean she’s never written a manual, but she could tell you the secrets, if she were here. And I—” he hesitates, then plunges forward, “I may remember some of them. I could tell you, if you like?” 

“Really?” Bucky asks, eagerly, then seems to check himself. “I mean—you don’t have to. Just because I’ve assigned myself the task doesn’t mean—I mean it’s not exactly in your job description here that you have to become a manual laborer with me. I’m sure you could find something more useful to do than I’m capable of at this point.” 

“Mmm,” Steve says. “Why _have_ you—assigned yourself to this?” He asks because he genuinely wants to know. “I mean, you could certainly be spending your time _less_ usefully, and no one would think much of it at all.” 

“You, Matilda, and Thomas would expect me to be significantly lazier and wouldn’t hold my lack of useful occupation against me, you mean?” 

Steve ducks his head, guiltily, since that’s exactly what he means. But Bucky laughs, and cuffs him lightly on the shoulder. 

“I don’t mind, Steve. I’d probably have expected it of me too.” He pauses. “I don’t know why, exactly. Just that there’s no one else to do it and—and I like…pretty things. This garden could be pretty, if anyone paid attention to it. But maybe pretty things _are_ pointless, so I’m still living down to expectations after all.” 

“No,” Steve says, swiftly, and Bucky gives him a quick, sharp look. Steve shakes his head again. “Nothing that takes so much care can be worthless…don’t you think?” 

Bucky tilts his head, looking again at the climbing roses. “It’s a nice way to look at it.” 

It’s not exactly agreement, Steve notices. 

“It’s making you happy, isn’t it?” Steve asks. “You seem…happier. Than I…than I thought you might.” 

“Happy for an exile?” Bucky says, with a twisted half-smile. 

Steve nods. 

“Happy for someone under a curse,” Bucky adds, softer, not meeting his eyes. 

Steve swallows, hard. He’s not sure if the limits of their relationship stretch to talking openly about this—about the reason they’re both here. 

Bucky tips his head back, eyes closed, so that the bright sunlight falls fully across his face. 

“It’s…almost hard to remember it,” he says, “in the sunshine. Almost.” 

Steve doesn’t quite feel allowed to respond to that, so he stays quiet. 

Bucky opens his eyes, and looks at him again, smiling—but it’s a more purposeful kind of smile, a mask for whatever else Bucky is thinking of. 

“And how will you spend your time?” Bucky asks, his eyes falling to the book at Steve’s side, which he’d been carrying before he dropped it to help. “Reading? You can have the bench, if you want. I’ll work around you.” He laughs, brightly, “if only my father were here to see that.” 

Steve looks at him for a moment, at the false, cheerful smile, but also at the tendrils of his hair escaping its braid around his face, the small trickle of sweat at his temple, and the smudge of dirt on his sharp, finely-carved cheekbone. Bucky’s eyes are bright in the sun, somewhere halfway between blue and grey, and more knowing than his pleasant expression would indicate. He has a sudden urge to reach out and wipe away the dirt on his cheek, to run his thumb over Bucky’s cheek, pink in the warm sun. He doesn’t. 

“I could help?” Steve offers, shifting back onto his knees. “If you wanted company?” 

Bucky’s smile fades a little, “You don’t have to. Like I said, nobody would consider it a part of your protection duties.” 

Steve tries out a smile of his own. “I’d like to. I like…pretty things too.” 

Bucky’s mouth twitches, and he looks away, wiping his sleeve across his forehead. 

“Alright then,” Bucky says, simply, leaning forward to sink his hands again into the greenery. 

Steve watches him for a moment, and then he too repositions his knees so that he can reach into the tangle, and soon they both lose themselves in the simple, rhythmic work of tugging weeds from the soft soil, as the sun climbs higher over the garden wall. 

***

After that they begin to meet by wordless agreement in the garden each morning after breakfast. 

They rarely cross paths in their common space before that, mostly because Steve can’t shake his soldier’s schedule, and continues to rise much earlier than Bucky. In the early mornings, when he’s alone, he tries to spend his time as usefully as possible. He generally saddles Ember, and does a half-hearted patrol around the length of the walls. The property is large enough for only a few people, but riding a loop of the valley on horseback takes a little less than three hours if he sets a quick enough pace. He never sees anything particularly worrying, or particularly helpful. But it makes him feel like he’s doing his job at least. 

It’s become quite clear to him that this assignment, if it is in fact dangerous, is dangerous in a way very unlike any he’s been on before. There are no armed bands coming to attack them, no arrows to dodge or swordsman to face. He feels ill-equipped for what it actually is—a nebulous kind of fear hanging over their otherwise easy days, waiting to manifest into something he has no ability to predict. But patrolling the walls makes him feel a little more prepared, even if it’s pointless. 

He knows that Bucky is still plagued by the nightmares that had descended on him in the days after Pierce’s departure. Bucky never says anything, but Steve can see it in the shadows under his eyes some days, in the slowness of his movements that show the effects of a restless night. 

They clear the area around the stone bench, and then move their work into the shadow of the fruit trees. It’s Steve’s suggestion, after eyeing the blossoms, that they start there first, to unchoke the trunks and give the trees a better chance at getting the nutrients needed for the fruit to grow through the summer. 

Sometimes they don’t speak much, because it’s work that requires a decent amount of energy. But Bucky isn’t naturally reticent anymore than Steve is naturally cold, so they do talk, more and more as the days go on, back to back or side by side in the garden. More on the days where Bucky isn’t wearing the mantle of nightmares. Those days, he’s quieter—Steve isn’t sure if just from lack of sleep, or from a legacy of darker thoughts that plague him after a bad night. 

It’s one of those days when they’ve finished clearing the ground around the two rows of trees—twelve in all, making a shady lane into the rest of the still wild tumble beyond. Steve suggests that they do some pruning, to clear some of the dead branches and unnecessary small shoots to give the mature branches a better shot. Bucky nods listlessly, and Steve notices that his hands shake a little when Steve asks him to hold the ladder steady as he cuts away the overgrowth. 

“They’re bad—your dreams?” He says after a while, unable to help himself from asking. Bucky’s face is just so pale, all his usual wonder and enjoyment in the work buried under something else. 

Bucky closes his eyes, looking strained. “They feel…very real.” 

“And nothing helps?” 

Bucky shakes his head, but then shrugs one shoulder. “Sometimes, I think they aren’t so bad when my body is tired enough. But not always.” 

Steve hums thoughtfully. It makes a little more sense—if he’d been surprised by Bucky’s initial interest in the hard work, he’d been even more surprised that he hadn’t given up on it after a day or two. He’s certain Bucky isn’t used to such taxing efforts…but if tiring out his muscles and his bones by days crouched over garden beds means there’s any smaller chance of his nightmares happening, Steve understands why he’d keep at it despite his gentle upbringing not exactly being suited to it. 

Bucky doesn’t meet his eyes, peering instead carefully at the base of an offshoot as he carefully saws at it with the edge of a knife, tossing it to the ground and moving on to the next near the base of the tree while Steve works in the upper branches. 

Steve lets him be for a few more minutes, absorbed in his methodical pruning. 

The silence is broken by a harsh, pained gasp, and Steve drops his knife when looks around sharply to see Bucky clutching his hand—a livid trickle of blood welling between his fingers. 

Steve jumps from the ladder to the ground, pushing Bucky’s fingers away from the wound. 

“My knife slipped,” Bucky grits out between his teeth. There’s a ragged tear across the base of his thumb, and Steve lets a breath hiss between his teeth in sympathy. 

“Here,” he says, pulling a clean handkerchief from his pocket and tying it tight around Bucky’s hand, “hold pressure on it, to stop the bleeding…” 

Bucky takes his hand back and squeezes against the wound with the other, but makes another pained sound at the sensation, jerking his hand away. Steve takes hold of his wrist, and presses against it, firmly but gently, holding Bucky still, though his hand twitches in Steve’s grasp. 

“It’s worse if you just let it bleed,” Steve says, apologetically, and Bucky gives him a tight nod, looking upward and blinking rapidly. 

“We’ll probably need to clean it out,” Steve says, glancing at the bloodied edge of Bucky’s knife at his feet, “I don’t really trust any of these blades that have been out in that shed for being too clean.” 

Bucky nods again, taking in a shaky breath. “Alright,” he says, his voice rather small. 

“Just—come with me. I’ll take care of it,” Steve says, pulling lightly on Bucky’s hand to make him follow. He’s going to let go, but Bucky steps forward quickly, falling in beside him without trying to retrieve his bloodied palm, so Steve keeps the pressure on with Bucky’s hand between his, and they walk like that around the back of the house. 

There’s no one around when they enter the scrubbed little kitchen—in the late afternoons between their lunch and dinner, Matilda usually works in other parts of the house cleaning and tidying as needed, and Thomas is spending the day in the wooded area further down the valley collecting firewood. 

Steve sits Bucky down on a high wooden stool, and releases his hand gingerly to settle on the counter. 

He locates a few clean cloths, and gives a triumphant _hah_ as he finds a bottle of witch hazel in the pantry, returning to Bucky beside the stone sink. 

Bucky looks up at him with a maudlin expression, and then back down at where his blood has soaked through Steve’s white handkerchief. 

“I don’t think I like being stabbed very much,” he says, in an attempt at humor—but his voice is a little creaky. 

Steve laughs, gently, and tugs the handkerchief free, holding Bucky’s hand over the basin so he can pump clean water over it. 

“No, it’s not an experience I recommend very often,” he agrees as Bucky clenches his jaw tight at the sensation of water over his wound. 

“You’ve—have you been stabbed a lot?” Bucky asks, hoarsely, looking away over Steve’s shoulder so he doesn’t have to look at the blood. 

“Maybe a little more than my share,” Steve says, absently, as he wipes at the edges of the cut with one of the cloths, trying to be as careful as possible. It’s not too deep, he thinks, which is good. And it’s already bleeding a little more sluggishly. He doesn’t really love the idea of having to give Bucky any kind of stitches—he’s alright with the kind of medicine you need to do for your fellow soldiers when there’s no other option, and maybe even a little better than most thanks to his mother’s training, but he isn’t anything like a royal healer like Bucky must be used to. 

“Tell me about it,” Bucky grits out. 

It takes a moment for Steve to understand what he means, as he examines Bucky’s hand. 

“Oh…right,” he says, reaching for the witch hazel. “Let’s see…took a practice sword to the thigh as a page, first week we started training with them. That was bad because they’re meant to be blunted, Natasha just managed to land it wrong—” 

“What happened to her?” 

“To Natasha?” Steve asks, momentarily confused. Then he realizes what Bucky means, and he grins. “She became one of your royal guard’s best swordsmen, and learned how to patch me up for the next time it counted. I caught a knife to the shoulder, just under my plate armor, in a skirmish a couple of years ago, and she’s the one who kept it from getting infected.” 

Bucky gives a surprised laugh. “Oh—I don’t know if I would be that forgiving, of someone who stabbed me. I’m pretty displeased with myself at the moment, anyway.” 

Steve laughs. “Once you’ve experienced it from the side where someone _really_ really means to do it, and is trying to do worse, the accidental stabbings don’t seem so bad in comparison. Just a few scars among friends. This is going to hurt,” he adds, before applying the witch hazel before Bucky can think too hard about it. 

Bucky swears, and Steve grips his wrist harder so he doesn’t jerk away. 

“This’ll keep if from getting infected, if that knife was rusty at all,” Steve says by way of explanation. 

Bucky gives him a dour look. “I don’t like you very much right now.” 

Steve’s mouth twists sideways, “Ah well—I can take it.” 

Bucky looks a bit petulant, his full lips pulling into a pout. But he looks down at the cloth Steve’s holding to his hand and says, “Thank you.” 

Steve pulls the soaked cloth away, and grabs for the other clean one, folding it into a triangle to tie tight around Bucky’s hand. 

“You’re welcome,” he says, as he secures the knot. He moves to release Bucky’s hand, but to his surprise Bucky curls his fingers around Steve’s, and brings his uninjured one over to cover them too, just for a moment. 

Steve’s eyes dart up to Bucky’s, and finds Bucky looking searchingly into his face. He closes his fingers over Steve’s, squeezing tight, and then lets go. 

“I’m lucky,” Bucky says, clearing his throat and looking away, “that you know what to do.” 

“Oh well,” Steve says, and he can feel a blush rising up his neck. “I’m sure Matilda would have done the same.” 

Bucky smiles faintly, and shakes his head. “Maybe. Still lucky, I think.” 

Steve doesn’t know what to say to that. He decides nothing is probably the safest bet. 

***

Bucky isn’t able to do as much in the garden while his hand heals. Steve can tell he isn’t happy about it, but he readily allows Bucky to boss him around, directing him here and there and getting his hands dirty where Bucky can’t. Bucky complains at length, and mostly sits in the grass or stalks around Steve looking languid and for once sparing his nice clothes from ruin.

He even lets himself tease Bucky about it, a little. The first time he does it, Bucky stares back at him, mouth open in shock, and Steve worries he went too far. But Bucky bursts into a peal of laughter, and hurls a branch at him with his good hand. 

“You _ass_ ,” he says, laughing, as Steve dodges the missile, “I’m an _invalid_!” 

“Yes, yes, it’s a very difficult life,” Steve shoots back, immediately ducking behind a tree to avoid another flying handful of uprooted dandelions.

The next time, it comes a little easier, and then easier, until Steve stops worrying each time that Bucky is going to rebuke him for being overly familiar. 

Secretly though, Steve finds himself as anxious as Bucky for his hand to heal. Bucky might not have been sure if working did any good, but three nights in a row after Bucky’s injury, Steve can hear the sounds of Bucky in the throes of a nightmare from across the floor of their chambers. 

It’s loud enough, the first night, to make Steve leave his bed, padding softly into the sitting room. But he isn’t sure what he can do. This doesn’t feel like it falls under his purview as guard. How is he supposed to protect Bucky from his own mind? He hovers in the dark room until Bucky quiets again, feeling guilty and unsettled. But barging into Bucky’s bedroom seems like something even their friendship doesn’t give him permission to do—and certainly not his official role. 

He takes to sleeping with his door cracked, though, so that he’ll be awoken by the noise in the night if there’s anything to hear—even if he can’t do anything about it it makes him feel better to know what kind of Bucky he can expect to meet the next morning. 

Some nights, when he can’t sleep because he knows that Bucky isn’t really resting either, he lights a lamp in his room and writes letters. He writes to his soldiers, knowing that it will be some time, if any, before he ever receives a reply. They’d been redeployed under Sam’s new leadership, back to the northern border, where the odds are chancy at best that they’ll receive any correspondence, and their leisure time for writing back will be even more limited. 

He starts several letters to his mother, too. Letters trying to formulate a way to ask for the advice he’d considered seeking from her so many times, before he even really knew Bucky. Now that he does know him…he hates the feeling of helplessness, unable to do anything. If there were something to fight for him, Steve would fight it. Maybe that’s what he really wants to ask his mother—what it is he needs to fight to put an end to Bucky’s suffering. But those letters he inevitably crumples and consigns to the fire, unfinished. Steve isn’t even sure what to say, much less if Sarah will be able to give him any kind of answer.

He’s sitting up at his small writing desk, quill hovering over the parchment as he tries for the hundredth time to compose a letter to Sarah, when he hears a muffled sound from Bucky’s side of the apartment. 

It’s usual that he can hear Bucky tossing, and often mumbling to himself, words Steve can never quite make out. But tonight there’s a heavier thud, and Steve half rises, concerned. 

There’s silence for a few moments, and then the click of Bucky’s door swinging open. Steve sets down his quill and creeps to his own door, peering out, and sees Bucky walking across the room toward the stairs. 

Steve hesitates, but decides not to call out to him. He doesn’t want Bucky to know how closely he’s been listening to him at night lately. But he does make his way to the widow that looks down over the front of the house, and watches as Bucky’s figure emerges. It’s dark, and there isn’t much moon, but he can follow the ghostly silhouette of Bucky’s white nightshirt as he wanders into the garden. 

Bucky, usually so careful about where he walks since his discovery of the nettles, wades directly into the hip high weeds in one of the areas they haven’t tackled yet. Steve frowns, but Bucky just stands stock still in the center of it, looking away in the opposite direction of the house. 

Maybe he’d wanted some fresh air, to clear his head, Steve thinks. But he can’t quite bring himself to turn around and return to his room while Bucky’s outside. So he stands at the window, watching as Bucky makes an odd, jerky loop around a few more times, before at last returning toward the house. 

Steve hastily retreats from the window, back into his room, and watches Bucky reenter from the crack in his door. 

Bucky doesn’t look around at all, apparently entirely unaware that Steve might not be asleep, heading directly back into his own bedroom and shutting the door. 

It takes a while for Steve to go to sleep after that, even though there’s only silence from Bucky’s side of the house. 

The next morning, Bucky points Steve toward the overgrown rose garden, and suggests that they start their work restoring it. 

As Steve begins gingerly unthreading the tall shoots of grass from among the thorns, Bucky picks his way between them, calling out to Steve as he inspects them to inform him of what color he thinks they’ll be when they bloom. A few feet away, Bucky goes still, bending over and looking more closely at the buds. 

“Steve,” Bucky says, and this time Steve looks up now, because Bucky’s tone has changed, he sounds odd. “What is this, do you think?” 

Steve rises stiffly from his knees, and makes his way over to look at what Bucky is gesturing toward. 

He’s holding the soft shoot of new growth in his hand, but the small spray of buds aren’t the bright fresh green that they should be—they’re black, starting at the tips and edging down toward the stems. 

“Look, here’s more of it,” Bucky says, pointing to other ruined would-be-roses, their tips black. 

Steve swallows. “Maybe…maybe frost bite?” He suggests, though he’s not sure that’s how roses would respond, even to an unseasonably late frost. “Was it—did you notice that it was very cold last night?” 

“Last night?” Bucky asks, distractedly, touching his fingers to another dark spot amidst the green. “No, Matilda always keeps my fire high so I never feel it in my room—why?” 

“In your…room,” Steve repeats, faintly. “But—out here, when you…?” He trails off at the strange expression on Bucky’s face, realizing with a cold sensation that Bucky doesn’t have any idea what he’s talking about. “You don’t remember coming out here,” he says, flatly. 

Bucky’s face is pale, and he shakes his head, hastily dropping the rose. “Last night?” 

Steve nods. 

“I must have—been sleepwalking,” Bucky says, clearly trying to keep his tone even. But Steve can feel his fear, because Steve is afraid, too. Bucky darts his eyes at the darkened roses. “You don’t think—”

“No,” Steve says, quickly. He doesn’t think. Or doesn’t want to think. Not that the strange creeping cold touching the vines has anything to do with Bucky. “It was probably a late frost. It happens, sometimes…even in the summer. You can never be sure.” 

Bucky’s chin is quivering, and he looks away from Steve, turning quickly to put his back to him so that Steve can’t see his face. “You’re probably right,” he says. 

Steve desperately hopes he is. 

That afternoon, Steve beckons Bucky to the kitchen and examines his hand. It’s healing reasonably well, the skin stitching back together on its own underneath a healthy scab. Steve nods, decisively, and finds a strip of clean bandaging to wrap it again as tight as he can. 

“This is strong enough, if you keep the bandage tied so it doesn’t get dirty, that you should be able to use it again. In the garden, I mean.” 

Bucky glances at him, quickly, and down at his hand, stretching and tightening it into a fist to test the bandage. He swallows, jaw working, and nods. 

“Good. That’s—it’s good.” 

Steve understands that Bucky knows what he’s doing—that they both are hoping that if Bucky can get back to work again, the exhaustion of it will work the way it did before, and keep his bad nights a little more at bay. 

It seems to help, a little at least. Bucky doesn’t wake that night—or not enough for Steve to hear—and Steve, after the previous week of wakeful midnight hours, can’t resist the call of his own pillow after he’s stayed up long enough past Bucky to hope that it will be a quiet night. He sleeps heavily and long, and Bucky stays in bed later into the morning than usual, which he takes as a good sign. 

Around them, thanks to hard work—whatever the motivation behind it and despite the…frost—the garden begins to thrive.

***


	5. The Prince's Dreams

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The dreams never come to him during the day, and never with anyone else to witness. So it seems safe, in the midst of a sunny meadow with Steve at his side, to close his eyes for a few moments of rest...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact, the art at the end of this chapter is what launched this whole au and collab! I thought and still think that inflomora's landscape looks like a John William Waterhouse painting, so naturally we determined it needed a handsome knight and a luscious haired companion to live in it :) 
> 
> Thank you all for your comments, I want you to know that they mean the world to me! My capacity for being on top of responding is lower than it usually is or has been with past fics, so I hope you'll forgive me and keep commenting and just know I treasure every single one even if I don't manage to tell you that directly! 
> 
> Anyway, time for some ~things~ to start happening, please enjoy ;)

Bucky’s dreams continue, irregularly, to be nightmares. 

It doesn’t happen every night, for which he’s thankful. But sometimes, even when he falls into bed with his back aching and muscles spent, it’s still not enough to keep the darkness from thickening around him into something much more alive. 

It takes different shapes. Sometimes the nightmares are like regular ones, no less upsetting but somehow familiar—dreams where he’s running from something in the garden, something hunting him. Sometimes, he feels as if he’s awake, but trapped inside the coffin of his body, and the thing that’s hunting him is in his room, leering at him from all the shadows which laugh and tug at his hair and clothes. 

And sometimes—the worst times— _he’s_ the thing in the darkness—those times he’s running again in the garden, or through the hallways of the palace, and his mother or father or Becca, or even once or twice Steve, are running ahead of him, their faces taut with fear and horror as he gains on them, nipping at their heels, grasping with hands he knows are his own but can’t stop from—

He hates it. 

He’s not sure if he sleepwalks again. Not sure if Steve would know, or would tell him if he did. But he remembers the creeping death in the garden after the night he had done it, and that terrifies him more than anything else. Whatever happens inside the walls of his bedroom, he can tell himself it isn’t real. But that _had_ been real—Steve had seen it too. And even if they’d both pretended it had nothing to do with him, he knows that neither of them were convinced. 

It taunts him, the fear and the feeling that his body isn’t his own that lingers over him after a bad night. 

It taunts him because it feels even more out of place than it had at the palace—when everything else about his life here is _comfortable_. He’s grown so fond of it, and it feels like the kind of existence which should be incompatible with doubt when everything about it is easy. It’s easy to eat simple, satisfying food and to sink his hands into the soil, to feel the sun on his face and to make Steve laugh, as often as he can. 

He wonders what it would be like, what living here would be without that ring of darkness lining the otherwise silver cloud of it. But then, if it weren’t for the shadows—for the sneaking suspicion that he isn’t safe, that his body has become something dangerous, he’d never have come here in the first place. He’d still be living in the palace, in training to be a king. He’d probably still have only the faintest idea of who Steve was. 

That thought alone nearly resigns him to taking the bad with the good. 

Bucky can hardly imagine his life without Steve in it anymore—Steve feels, somehow, so much more real than anything in his palace life had. He can’t remember what he spent his time thinking of before, how he enjoyed things without the immediate question of whether Steve would like it too—if it’s something they could share and laugh and talk about together. 

He wonders if Steve still feels trapped here with him, or if Steve has come to love this life like he has. 

Bucky knows he can never ask. It would be too hard to bear if the answer was no. 

So he doesn’t ask. But he savors the time they spend together among the trees, checking on the progress of the green fruit now clustered along the branches, and the flowers that are springing up with all the full force of early summer in their now tidy beds. 

As the days pass, there’s still work to be done, but less of the kind they’d tackled in the beginning. They’ve cleared and pruned and planted, and if there are still weeds to pull it doesn’t feel like the battle it had at the beginning. They’re in check now. Bucky is worried, at first, that it means Steve won’t see a reason for them to always be side by side, with the initial goal accomplished. 

Instead, Steve suggests that they explore further into the valley, beyond the garden and into the meadowland and trees below. Long walks and sometimes long rides, spurring Jacinth and Ember into a canter beside each other across the grass, take the place of their days kneeling in the dirt. It’s nearly as good as the weeding and clearing had been to keep him active enough to be tired when night falls. 

Often, the sunshine is bright enough on their back and in their eyes, gleaming on Steve’s golden hair, that Bucky can forget that the darkness he’s most afraid of isn’t the darkness of the night sky at all, but whatever piece of it has taken up residence inside him. At least in the daylight, it seems to stay tucked out of sight where it belongs. 

Bucky’s clothes all have patches now, and little mended up tears where roses and brambles have clutched at him over the weeks. He’s put aside his most ostentatious wardrobe items anyway, in favor of whatever passes for simple enough that he doesn’t mind getting them dirty. Steve too, has amended his preferred uniform, rarely donning his leather jerkin or mail, except when they ride far out into the valley and he seems to feel he needs to be prepared for…a something Bucky is certain won’t happen. But it’s sort of nice, to think that the only threat in this walled valley isn’t him. 

Steve’s hair has grown a little longer too, and he’s let his beard grow. It makes him look a little softer, and a bit older, though not in a bad way. It’s just enough unkempt compared to the sharp haircut and clean shaven face he’d kept at the palace that he looks less like a captain, less a guardsman only here to perform a duty. 

Bucky finds his eyes lingering on the long fringe of it, curling with sweat at Steve’s nape and temples, probably more often than he should really let himself. He tells himself it’s just the natural interest in the only other person he sees with regularity, that it comes from living in each other’s pockets that he categorizes each small, slow change. 

There’s a dusting of freckles on Steve’s nose from the sun that wasn’t there before. 

Bucky’s fingers itch, sometimes, to reach out and touch them. 

_That_ is certainly not anything he would have allowed himself to think, in his life before. It’s probably not really something he ought to be thinking about in his life now, either. But the rules feel much more permeable here, for better or worse. Like how Steve lets himself tease Bucky, even though Bucky could see the first time how he was afraid he shouldn’t. 

Bucky sighs, shaking himself out of the reverie, and glances over at the man in question. 

They’re eating lunch, perched in the grass under the shade of an apricot tree in which the green fruit is steadily brightening into orange each day. Steve is slumped with his back against the trunk, one knee propped up, his other long leg stretched easily out in front of him. 

Steve, who unfortunately always seems to know when Bucky’s eyes are on him, tips his head to look at him, smiling lazily and nudging Bucky’s boot with his. 

“What are you thinking?” He asks. Bucky feels himself go pink, and shoves a too-large piece of one of Matilda’s currant rolls into his mouth. 

“Nuffing,” he mumbles, around his mouthful.

Steve nudges his foot again, harder. “Liar.” 

Bucky swallows with some difficulty, and scoffs. “We’ll have apricots soon,” he says, looking up between the branches. 

“Mmmhmm. Apricots are very serious business,” Steve agrees, with just the slightest hint of a laugh in his voice that tells Bucky he’s being sarcastic, “worthy of your intent consideration just now.” 

Bucky laughs, awkwardly, and looks at Steve again. His eyes are bright with mirth, the color shockingly blue in his tanned face. Bucky opens his mouth to say something, but can’t quite think of anything, his brain failing to catch up to cover for the slight quickening of his heart. 

Steve’s teasing grin fades a little, as he holds Bucky’s eyes. His tongue darts out over his lower lip as his eyebrows pull together, and Bucky immediately curses his own gaze for dropping quickly and noticeably to the motion. Steve’s mouth drops open, and he sits a little straighter against the tree. 

“Bucky…” he starts, sounding as serious as he’d just accused Bucky of being. 

Bucky suddenly doesn’t want to hear what he’s about to say—Steve telling him off maybe, albeit gently. Steve wouldn’t be harsh about it. But Bucky would rather he get angry than have to hear Steve’s gentle reminder of their relative places in the world. 

Bucky stands quickly, brushing crumbs off his lap. “I think I’ll cut some of the peonies. They’re starting to fade, we should enjoy them while we can,” he says in a rush, turning away from Steve. “If you want some for your room I’ll—” 

“Bucky,” Steve says again, rising to his feet, a small note of pleading entering his voice. 

Bucky turns to him with a bright, false feeling smile. “They smell amazing. You should have some—we both should. I’ll—I’ll race you.” 

And with that childish statement, Bucky darts past Steve, up the lane of fruit trees, and breaks into a run toward the other side of the garden, pretending very hard and not believing himself for a moment that he isn’t running away. 

Steve doesn’t quite meet the challenge of a race, though Bucky’s sure he would beat him in a heartbeat if he tried, but he does jog to Bucky’s side a few moments later as Bucky slides to a halt in the middle of the peony beds. 

“They do smell nice,” Steve says, tentatively. And Bucky hears it for the peace offering it is, and the promise that Steve isn’t going to press him about wherever he suspects Bucky’s thoughts to have wandered just now, at least for the moment. 

They both gather an armful of the fat, cheery flowers, Bucky piling Steve’s arms with the pink and scarlet and striped white blossoms before filling his own, ignoring the way Steve’s eyes watch him more closely than usual. 

When Bucky falls into his tall bed that night, he can smell the scent from his vaseful wafting from the window sill on the soft warm breeze. He wonders if Steve’s nose is full of the delicate scent too. Then he wonders if it’s as potent a reminder of the conversation they _didn’t_ have for Steve as it is for him. 

Then he tells himself to stop wondering and go to sleep. 

His dreams that night are decidedly nightmares. The worst kind. 

In utter darkness he pursues someone through the garden—at some moments it’s Becca, at others his mother, but mostly it’s Steve. Bucky claws across the green turf, tearing the earth underneath him with a body that isn’t his own, yet is, anyway. And even under the cover of a night much blacker than any they’ve seen in their time here, he can still see that the earth where he walks grows darker still where he touches it—and the garden itself seems to try to run from him, leaves and flowers curling away and blackening as he moves through them, trees crumbling to ash as he passes. 

Many times, through that long night, he finds himself gaining on his quarry—and sees the look in their eyes as they fall in front of him: horror, disgust, and terror without recognition. 

He does not wake rested, but he welcomes the first pale streaks of dawn anyway as a reprieve, shuddering as he stumbles from his bed. He doesn’t turn to look at the mess of his bedclothes wrenched away from the mattress by his own grasping hands. 

It’s early enough when he staggers out of his room, after dressing hastily, that he surprises Steve at the dining table as he eats his customarily early breakfast. 

“Are you alright?” Steve asks, with an undertone of alarm. Bucky imagines his appearance isn’t exactly in his favor right now. 

“I’m—” Bucky starts, intending to say _fine_ , but his shoulders sag and instead he drops heavily into the seat across from Steve. “No.” 

“It was…your dreams?” Steve asks, hesitant. 

Bucky nods. Steve watches him for a moment, concern in the furrowed lines of his forehead. 

“Should we…ride out? Today? Explore…?” Steve suggests, finally. 

Bucky considers. He’s exhausted, but not the kind that produces actual sleep unfortunately. His body feels like a lamp set to burn too bright and fast. But maybe if he could wear himself out, at least tonight could be better…

He nods, decisively. “Yes. Whenever you’re ready.” 

Steve drops the last of his toast and jam, half-eaten onto his plate, and stands, brushing off his hands. 

“I’ll get dressed. Meet me in the stables?” 

Bucky nods again, gratefully, and rises too. 

He’s already dressed, so rather than kick his heels pacing around while he waits for Steve, Bucky rummages through a cupboard to find a bag to pack up the rest of the untouched breakfast. He doesn’t want to come back to the house before he’s thoroughly worn out, so it seems like a good idea to bring something for lunch with them rather than have to return ahead of time to eat. He hopes Steve forgives him when he has to eat cold cheese and bread and fruit for another meal rather than the hot food Matilda usually prepares—but then, he knows enough to know Steve worries about him, regardless of what capacity the worry comes from. 

It’s quick, silent work for them both to saddle their horses in the weak morning light. Bucky even likes doing it—it’s another of those things someone else had always been on hand for in the palace that he’d never really questioned. But now he enjoys the process of checking Jacinth’s buckles and bridle, and settling into the saddle after securing it himself with a pat on Jacinth’s arched neck. 

They set out wordlessly, and Steve kicks Ember into a brisk pace without Bucky even having to tell him it’s what he needs this morning. 

At first, they follow their usual track along the inside of the high wall, making an easy curving loop toward the end of the valley. But soon, again sensing what Bucky can’t bring himself to say, Steve tugs on his reins, directing them down the sloping hillside into the rougher uncut terrain. They zigzag through the woods and across several meadows, up the other side of the valley and down again, drawing the rid out as long as they can make it and seeing pieces of their sanctuary that they haven’t before. Each time it seems they might reach the end, or need to turn, Steve artfully redirects their path to circle back again to keep it from ending. 

After enough hours that the sun has climbed to its peak in the sky over them, Bucky feels the anxious tension in his limbs giving way to a much more satisfying weariness. 

He nudges Jacinth forward beside Steve, and says, “I think…I could eat. If you’re ready to stop for a little.” 

Steve immediately pulls back on Ember’s reins, slowing her, and Jacinth slows too to match his companion’s pace. 

“I think—through these trees—there’s a meadow we passed through before. We can let the horses rest a bit,” Steve says. 

Bucky follows him, and sure enough when they break through the edge of the small copse they find themselves again on the valley floor. The meadow is filled with smooth spring grasses, dotted with flowers, and there’s a stream too. He can’t see the house from here, hidden behind them by the line of trees, and he can’t see the walls either—the sloping valley hiding them from view on every side. 

Steve drops down into the grass, and Bucky does the same. They unsaddle the horses—neither overtaxed yet from their exertions, but both showing a sheen of damp sweat beneath their saddle blankets. 

Ember is well-trained and loyal to Steve, and will never roam far when turned loose. Bucky has a little less reason to trust Jacinth to have as good of manners on his own, but he won’t stray far from Ember. So they let the horses make their way to the stream, where they both drink deeply before turning with mild interest to graze at the edge of the grass. 

Bucky spreads Jacinth’s saddle-blanket across the ground, in the full, bright noon sunlight, and dumps the contents of their neglected breakfast from its bag. 

Steve seats himself only a little stiffly on one side of the blanket, the sun glinting off his mail shirt, and the star insignia of his rank and unit on its chain around his neck. Most of the time Steve doesn’t bother to wear anything like his uniform, but Bucky suspects that he’d donned it today in some small part to feel less unsettled. Bucky wishes he had something to wear that made him feel more in control or safer than he currently does. But all he has is his usual soft garments and the knowledge that they don’t change whatever he is. 

“Does it help? Riding?” Steve asks, in a low voice, after they’ve both taken a few bites of their makeshift lunch. 

Bucky swallows dryly around a mouthful of cheese and nods, slowly. 

“A little. I’m more tired, now.” 

“And that’s a good thing?” Steve asks. 

“Usually,” Bucky says. “It doesn’t seem so bad in the daytime or—or when I’m not alone.” 

He isn’t sure if he should have added that last part, but he’s too soul-weary to manage anything but the truth right now. It _is_ better with Steve. Sometimes he wonders, if he could keep Steve near him after the sun goes down…but it probably wouldn’t matter. And he doesn’t want to subject Steve to the restlessness of his nights. 

“Whatever you need, Bucky,” Steve says. 

His gaze is sharp on Bucky, and Bucky feels ill-equipped to deflect it right now, or to hide from whatever Steve is seeing. He turns, somewhat awkwardly, to gesture at the line of the hills behind them. 

“It’s pretty out here,” he says. 

Steve looks at him for another long moment, before he follows Bucky’s motion to look at what he’s pointing to. 

“It is,” Steve says. “I wonder what it looks like in the winter. It’s hard to imagine it ever being different from how it is just now.” 

Bucky takes in a shaky breath. “You think—you think we’ll see for ourselves?” 

He’s not sure what the prospect makes him feel. He wouldn’t exactly like the thought of leaving soon, but the idea that the reason for his imprisonment might be lifted before the change of seasons is more than appealing enough to make him feel conflicted about it. 

“I don’t know,” Steve says, honestly. “But I’m sure a winter here can’t be so terrible.” 

“You’re not wishing you could go home?” 

Steve shrugs, and tosses the pit of an apricot out into the grass. “The palace is only my home sometimes, and I don’t think I’d be there much even if…if we were told to return. There’s always somewhere else that needs me more. This feels as homey as a guardsman could ask in an assignment.” 

Bucky chews his lip, turning that over. It must be odd, for Steve, to live most of his life in a place he doesn’t call home, whether it’s the palace or any of his other duty stations. Bucky knows exactly what his life would be if this all went away. Some of it is good. But some of _this_ is good too. 

Bucky sets down the other half of the orange he’d been eating, his appetite sated for the moment. With his stomach full, and his muscles tingling with the tell-tale, satisfying ache of hard use, he suddenly feels his exhaustion crashing over him in a wave. He doesn’t actually _sleep_ on nights he spends in nightmares, not in the way that counts for rest. 

He blinks heavily up at the sun, just beginning to tip over into the very first of its downward climb. They still have several hours of afternoon left, and if they didn’t take such a weaving track he’s pretty sure it can’t be more than an hour’s direct ride to return, when they feel like it. 

The sun feels like a spell of protection all in itself, the daylight keeping the still lingering fear he has at bay for the moment—so he glances at Steve, and asks, sheepishly, 

“Would it be absolutely terrible if I shut my eyes for a few moments?” 

Steve, bless him, smiles broadly at him. “Of course not—you think you could sleep a little?” 

Bucky squints at the sun again, and nods. “Just a catnap, maybe. As long as we get back before dark.” 

“I’ll wake you before sunset, if it seems like you need it,” Steve says, staunchly. 

Bucky sighs, stretching his body out across his edge of the blanket, already feeling sleep tugging at him. He bunches the empty cloth sack under his head for a pillow, and curls up facing Steve. 

“Thank you, Steve.” 

Then he lets his eyes droop shut, and gives in to the floating sensation that carries him away—the sun like a soothing as a lullaby, warming his face. 

The darkness never threatens him in the day. 

It’s one of the rules Bucky has counted on, in the corner of his mind that stays cognizant of what’s happening at night when the terrors take him. He’s always known it would end with the dawn, and that he would be spared from returning at least for the dozen or so hours that the sun holds court overhead. 

Which is why he doesn’t understand what’s happening, as he dozes in the brightly lit meadow, when the shadows begin to lengthen across his mind. 

By the time his dream self is aware that he’s crossed the border into a nightmare, he’s already too deep in it to have any chance of waking himself, as he sometimes can at the beginning of the night—he’s fully in its grasp. 

Bucky can almost see himself, lying on a blanket surrounded by wildflowers—he can see the little dark pinpricks of shadow cast by the grass, by himself, by the horses, congealing into something liquid that rises up from its rightful place and flows into him, freezing his limbs as his mind goes blank with fear. 

He’s running, panting heavily, the breath jagged shards of ice in his lungs—

a tree, the apricot, ablaze with flame against a night sky—

_teeth, a gaping mouth—_

his feet, sticking to the earth, digging down into it, sending out painful roots that tear the soil and spread—

Steve, legs akimbo, sprawled against the stone bench, face white—

_high above, looking down, fields blackening and houses—_

a palace hall, eating up the space as he tumbles toward the throne room, _eating eating eating—_

he’s in his bedroom, the walls are crushing in on him, they shatter as he explodes out into the night—

his chest cracks open, cold spilling from between his ribs—

_the darkness, darkening still and full of ice—_

Suddenly, there’s a searing point of fire, cutting through the images, burning his cheek. He flinches away at first, tipping backward into the embrace of the cold dark—but then he leans into it, letting the heat warm him so he has a face again, a shape—

He hears his name, somewhere distant in his good ear, the one near the spreading point of fire on his cheek—Bucky tries to focus on it, on the sound and the warmth, pulling him back—

There’s a sound like gnashing teeth all around him, and he doesn’t want to fight whatever it is, but he also really does, and there’s a glimpse of something, a glimmer of what he might remember to be light, just a pinprick in the black tunnel of his vision, and he wrenches himself toward it until—

Bucky blinks his eyes open to the bright glare of sunlight, his vision swimming as he gasps awake, and discovers that the searing heat is Steve’s hand on his cheek. 

Steve is kneeling over him, concern etched on every line of his face. Bucky can still feel the creeping fingers of the nightmare clutching at him, trying to drag him back, but Steve’s hand and Steve’s warmth are an anchor against the current, and Bucky throws himself against Steve’s chest with a wracking sob, trying desperately to soak in every bit of it he can, so let it seep into his skin and make him human again. 

Steve sits heavily beside him, wrapping his arms around Bucky with a whoosh of surprised breath, and Bucky doesn’t have the presence of mind yet to be embarrassed about how he clings to Steve, pulling and grasping at him blindly, just wanting him closer—close enough to press out the last of the nightmare. 

Bucky can feel, slowly, the last of the freezing cold vanishing as Steve’s arms warm him. He tips his face into Steve’s neck, pressing his nose just below Steve’s ear and breathing deep, trying to calm his frantic lungs which are still heaving as if he’s been running. 

His heart is racing, too, in reaction to the fear, and Bucky can’t help but look wildly around—still convinced that the shadows might rise up again and take him back. 

“Hey, hey,” Steve says, pulling back to look at him, and Bucky grabs at his arms to keep him from moving, almost hysterical with panic. 

“Don’t—please—” Bucky gasps, digging his fingers into Steve’s shoulders, and willing him to understand. 

“Bucky,” Steve says, his voice strained, “tell me what to do—what do you need?” 

Bucky squeezes his eyes shut tight, and shakes his head. He can’t remember the words that would make sense, to tell Steve that he’s the only warm thing in the world, that Steve himself seems to be a spell against whatever had gripped him—

“Please,” he just says again, “please—” 

Bucky does the only thing that makes any sense in that moment: he leans forward and crushes his mouth against Steve’s. 

The fear and the darkness don’t vanish, exactly. But he does feel it instantly retreat back into the place it all seems to live during the daytime, with a sensation like the drain being pulled from a bathtub, returning to its corner under his ribs. 

Steve goes very still, his arms freezing in place around Bucky. And though he doesn’t pull away, he doesn’t quite kiss Bucky back either. 

Bucky realizes it as soon as his head clears all the way, and he pulls back, biting his lip. He doesn’t regret it—he feels as if he’s been yanked from a great precipice by the kiss. But he doesn’t want to see the expression on Steve’s face, either. 

Whatever just happened, between Steve witnessing the nightmare and the kiss, Bucky fills with instant fear that this has ruined everything. 

Still, he can’t bring himself to pull entirely free of Steve’s arms either, from their circle of safety. He ducks his head. 

“Bucky,” Steve says, softly, one hand moving slowly again to his cheek, tipping his face up and forcing Bucky to meet his eyes. There’s no anger there, and even better, no pity—just worry and a little confusion as Steve searches his face. “What…?” 

Bucky opens his mouth, but still can’t find the words. He shakes his head a little, and Steve smooths his thumb over Bucky’s cheekbone—and Bucky is startled to feel that Steve’s hand is shaking. 

“I’m sorry,” Bucky whispers, his voice feeling hoarse as if he’s been screaming, and he desperately hopes he wasn’t. “I’m sorry, I didn’t—” but he doesn’t know how to finish the sentence. _I didn’t mean to_ or anything like it would be entirely untrue, and he feels too fragile to invite the darkness of a lie between them now. 

“I’m not,” Steve says, equally quietly. And if his hands are unsteady, his voice is firm. Bucky widens his eyes in surprise, and feels a painful swell of hope bubble up. 

“You aren’t?” Bucky asks. 

“Not if you—” Steve hesitates. “Not if it’s what you need.” 

Bucky frowns. He’s not sure he likes that answer. “And you?” 

Steve gives a jerky shake of his head, “I don’t—it doesn’t matter about me—what I want—” 

Bucky swallows, and takes a chance that Steve isn’t yet saying what he really means, that maybe—Bucky reaches up with trembling fingers and brushes a long lock of Steve’s gold hair away from where it’s falling toward his eyes. 

“It matters to me,” he says. “If you’re just a more devoted guard than anyone would expect, or if...” 

He trails off, not brave enough, after all, to finish the question. _If you want this too._

Steve meets his eyes again, and tips his cheek into Bucky’s hand, their faces mirrored now. 

“No,” he says at last, his voice a low rumble. “Not just that.” 

Bucky holds his breath, and Steve doesn’t make him wait. He tilts his chin, hand sliding to the back of Bucky’s neck to draw him in, and brushes his lips against Bucky’s—a whisper at first, and then more firmly, and Bucky sighs into the kiss, feeling all the tension unspool within him. 

Steve kissing _him_ is a hundred times better than he could have hoped for. He loops his arms around Steve’s neck, and parts his lips, inviting Steve to deepen it. Steve lets Bucky’s head tip back, his fingers twining through Bucky’s hair to cradle it, and Bucky leans back into the strong circle of Steve’s arm. 

Steve follows him down, letting Bucky’s back hit the blanket, and suddenly Steve is stretched out beside and above him, kissing him softly and deeply by turns, and Bucky isn’t thinking, exactly, but registers somewhere vaguely at the back of his mind that he hopes he never has to catch his breath again. 

Steve shifts a little, moving over Bucky to bracket his head with his forearms, hands threading again into the loose strands of Bucky’s hair splayed out over the blanket, and Bucky wraps his arms around Steve’s waist to keep him close. 

It’s so warm in the sun, with Steve’s weight pressing him into the blanket, and Bucky almost worries for a moment that it’s not real after all—that he’d simply managed to wander across the border of his nightmare into a dream instead. But then Steve’s tongue slides along his lower lip, and a spark of heat rises in him to meet it, and Bucky knows that he’s much too present in his body for this to be anything but real. He opens his mouth for Steve’s, and tastes Steve like summer on his tongue. 

Bucky’s breath is coming heavy again, and he shifts under Steve, arching up against him, _wanting_ —until Steve pulls away, breaking the kiss with a breathless laugh. He moves a hand to Bucky’s hip beside him on the blanket, holding him still, and drops his forehead to Bucky’s, eyes closed. 

“Bucky we—we can’t,” he says, voice a bit thready. 

“Why not?” Bucky asks, nipping one more time, playfully, at Steve’s full lower lip, and pressing his fingers into the small of Steve’s back. 

“Because—” Steve says, “because you’re _you_ and I’m…I’m not,” he finishes, lamely. 

Bucky chuckles, low in his throat. “If we were both me it would be significantly less interesting.” 

“Bucky,” Steve says again, opening his eyes with a sigh, and loosening his hands from their grip in Bucky’s hair so that Steve can roll over onto his back beside him. “You know what I mean.” 

Bucky sighs too, hearing the serious note of worry in Steve’s voice, and settling himself to deal with it. Of course Steve would make himself feel guilty about this. Bucky just sort of wishes he’d held it off to a less tempting moment. 

Bucky shifts onto his side, propping his head on one hand, his elbow on the blanket, to look down at the crease between Steve’s eyebrows. 

“Steve,” he says, as soothingly as he can, placing the other hand in the center of Steve’s heart, his palm centered on Steve’s star insignia. “We can if we both want. We _should_ if we both want. Who’s to stop us?” 

Steve blinks his eyes open, but the crease doesn’t disappear. “If we weren’t here—if we were somewhere else, in the palace—” 

“But we aren’t,” Bucky says, firmly. “And even if we were, there’s no—there isn’t any law against it.” 

“You’re a prince,” Steve says. 

Bucky frowns. “And you’re the best captain in the royal guard.” 

“That’s the _point_ , we’re not equals—” Steve cuts off, with a frustrated noise, bringing one hand up to run through his hair. “It’s my duty to protect you, I’m not free to—” 

“Does this,” Bucky says, cutting him off and leaning down to brush his lips softly against Steve’s, “make you want to protect me less?” 

Steve hums in his throat, but he chases after Bucky’s mouth when Bucky pulls away, and Bucky grins down at him. 

“Does it?” He asks again. 

“Of course not,” Steve says, his hand moving to squeeze Bucky’s waist. 

“Maybe what they’d say is that I’m the one taking advantage,” Bucky says, running his hand in a small circle over Steve’s broad chest. “Maybe the problem is that you aren’t free to say no to me, because you’ve sworn an oath to the crown to honor and obey—” 

“That’s _not_ why I can’t say no to you,” Steve says, gripping Bucky’s fingers to still them. 

“Then why shouldn’t we?” Bucky asks again, this time seriously. “If it’s what we both want? How can it be anything wrong?” 

“You—you’re—” Steve says, and Bucky can see him fighting for an argument, for whatever it is that’s still holding him back. “Something terrible has happened to you, Buck. And I’m supposed to be making things easier not—not more complicated.” 

“Ah,” Bucky says, understanding. “Steve I—it’s never come over me before in the day, like this. If you hadn’t been here I don’t know if I could have—I don’t know what would have happened. But you were here. You’re always here, and I kissed you because it was the only one good think I could think of that would make the bad go away. Because it made me safe. Do you understand?” 

Steve blinks up at him, mouth parted in surprise. “Are you sure?” He whispers. 

Bucky nods, solemnly. “About you, and almost nothing else. Please don’t shut me out because you think it’s better for me—I promise you it isn’t. I’d swear it on anything you want.” 

Steve closes his eyes, and swallows hard, his throat working over some unspoken feeling. 

“I’d do anything, to make things better for you,” he says, at last. 

“Then stay with me, tonight,” Bucky says, lying own again with his head beside Steve’s golden one, pressing his forehead to Steve’s temple. “Don’t make me sleep alone again.” 

Steve winds his arm around Bucky’s shoulder, gathering him in tightly to his side, and lets out a long, slow breath. 

“Alright,” he says, simply. 

Bucky takes in a deep breath, relief washing over him and settling into his bones. He believes it, believes Steve entirely, and it feels for the first time in a long time like a guarantee that he might be alright—he might make it through this, in the end. 

He curls into Steve’s side, and lets the warm breeze dance across them both in the honeyed light of the sinking afternoon—not afraid, at least for the moment, with Steve anchoring him, to close his eyes.

***


	6. Bravery

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky has more nightmares, and they find a new way to fight them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi guys, a day late today. It felt like too much going on this weekend to post anything, as those of you in the states will understand (and probably most of you out of them, too). 
> 
> Remember, the bravest thing we can do is love each other—and sometimes that means getting angry as hell and toppling oppressive institutions. 
> 
> Enjoy the chapter everyone, there's some NSFW art coming at you at the end of this one from inflomora!!

Steve stays with Bucky that night. 

He wonders, for a moment, when they get back to the house in the purple half-light of dusk, if Bucky will have changed his mind. He’d said it in the heat of the moment, in the heat of their kisses still hovering between them. Steve thinks it might be different after they ride home, unsaddle the horses, eat their dinner in the lamplight of their shared living space, to cross that threshold together in a way they can’t take back. 

But when they’ve both finished their meal, lingering a little over their wine, neither wanting to make the move to rise, it seems, Bucky is the one who finally pushes his glass away and stands. He holds his hand out to Steve as he comes around the table, expression vulnerable, but determined. 

Steve takes his hand, and lets Bucky gently lead him toward his bedroom door—the final line in their space which Steve has never brought himself to cross. 

They undress quietly in the yellow glow of the fire in Bucky’s hearth, neither looking at the other. Steve removes his clothes self-consciously, down to his underthings. 

Bucky takes his hand again, and now Steve does look at him. He’s wearing a soft nightshirt, his hair a little rumpled around his face where he’s shaken it out of its braid. His face is a little more uncertain now, eyebrows raised in a question. 

Steve squeezes his hand, reassuring him. “I’m here,” he says, voice low in the otherwise silent room. 

“I know,” Bucky says back, face relaxing a little. 

He lets Bucky climb into the high bed first, following after him as gently as he can, as if a sudden motion might crack the whole thing wide open. 

But when he’s settled himself under the comforter, Bucky immediately moves toward him, pillowing his head on Steve’s shoulder and pushing at his arms until they’re wrapped solidly around him, their bodies entwined from head to toe. 

Bucky lets out a long, slow sigh of relief, his eyes etched with exhaustion, and Steve lets himself release an answering sigh of contentment, snuggling in and letting the tension leave his body. 

“Thank you,” Bucky says, mumbling into Steve’s chest, his voice drowsy but sincere. 

Steve doesn’t answer. He just focuses on holding Bucky tight—and willing whatever it was that let him pull Bucky back from the brink of his nightmare in the meadow today to keep working its magic, that his presence might let Bucky finally sleep tonight. 

He listens to Bucky’s even, heavy breathing for a long time, until the fire has burned down into embers in the grate, before he lets his own breath begin to deepen. 

He’s had a lot of practice at this point, in making himself wake up to even the slightest hints that Bucky is having nightmares. So when he wakes up many hours later to sunlight filtering in through the high windows, he’s able to be certain that it only means one thing. 

Sleeping in Steve’s arms, at least this night, Bucky’s dreams had finally let him be. 

***

Steve doesn’t return to his room across the house after that. And soon, Bucky stops looking hesitant each night, when they finish eating or reading by the fire or whatever else. 

Steve smiles, a few nights later, when Bucky yawns and drops his book beside his chair, turning toward the bedroom door without one of his furtive little looks to see if Steve will follow. 

“Come to bed soon,” Bucky says, stretching, with another yawn, disappearing into his bedroom seemingly sure, now, that Steve will. 

The next day, Steve moves his clothes into a corner of Bucky’s wardrobe. 

He wonders if Matilda has noticed that his bed hasn’t been slept in for nearly a week. The thought _almost_ makes him leave his wash things and clothing in his room just for appearances—he’s still a bit self-conscious of how this development between him and the Crown Prince might look to someone outside of it. But he forces himself not to be swayed by how it might seem. It doesn’t matter what anyone thinks but him and Bucky. Besides, whatever Matilda thinks or suspects, Steve knows she’ll keep it to herself. 

It’s amazing how hard it is, after just a few days, to remember what it was like before he and Bucky started sharing a bed. It’s even harder when, despite the general success of the endeavor, Bucky still slips into one of his nightmares. But this time, instead of listening from across the hall, paralyzed by indecision, Steve is right there—it takes some time to coax him awake, but when he _does_ wake up, Steve is there to hold him through his shakes. He can barely remember how he stood it, listening and unable to do anything about it. 

And it’s being there for it for the first time, feeling how cold Bucky grows in his arms, how long it takes before the shadows clear from his eyes and for face to relax from its tense lines, that finally makes Steve do what he hasn’t known how to do before. 

He leaves Bucky in bed, finally sleeping peacefully in the bright morning light, and pads quietly back into his own abandoned bedroom, settling himself in at his writing desk to pull over a fresh sheet of parchment. 

_Mama,_

_I’m sorry I haven’t written lately. My new duties haven’t been quite what I expected, though I’ve been much more comfortable here than anywhere I’ve been stationed before—and you’ll be glad at least to hear there hasn’t been a reason to draw a sword in well over a month. I don’t even wear it, actually, most of the days._

He pauses, considering for the hundred and first time just what he wants to say. This time he doesn’t let himself stop, and writes, quickly enough that he smudges some of the ink: 

_But there is danger here, of a different kind. I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors about Alexander Pierce, and the Prince’s curse. Now that I’ve had the reason to see it up close, I can say it’s all true—and worse in some ways than I feared._

He starts to write “Bucky is…” and hastily scratches it out before he continues. 

_Prince James is plagued by nightmares, dreams that seem to portend something more real than they should. There’s a darkness of Pierce’s making dogging him, and I feel powerless to help. You of all people can probably guess about how much I like that. And what’s worse—or better, I don’t know—is that I’ve come to care for him too much to watch it happening without seeing if there’s anything I can do. You’re the only one I know I can ask about this. The mages at the University are doing what they can, I’m sure—but I need your advice. You know magic better than anyone else I know, and you know me. If there’s a chance that you can See anything, please help me. Is there anything to be done?_

Steve sits back, rereading what he’s written. If there’s any chance that the message might be intercepted, he doesn’t want to do more harm than good. If someone thought he was too impartial for the task, if he were to be reassigned…but he thinks anyone else reading it wouldn’t learn anything they might not already know, that he’s perhaps a loyal guard who cares about his charge. He suspects his mother will see right through the lines to what he’s really saying though. 

_I love you, and I miss you. I wish you were here, that I could talk to you about all of this face to face. But until we have that chance again,_

_I remain your loving son, Steve_

He finishes it off, if not feeling that he’s quite managed to say everything, at least relieved at last to have said it at all. 

Steve seals the letter swiftly with a dollop of wax, waving it to dry it closed. Then he adds Sarah’s direction to the front, and mentally tries to calculate how long it will take to reach Sarah in the west, and again how long it might be before he can look for an answer. 

He leaves it beside their breakfast things, where Matilda generally collects any of his correspondence to be sent out. Though none of them locked inside these walls are able to go beyond them, they’re able to pass things like letters in and out through a window in the gate, collected and delivered in turn by one of Thomas’s friends. 

When he returns to Bucky’s bedroom, he finds Bucky still asleep, though beginning to stir against the white pillows. Steve climbs up into the bed beside him, warming his cold toes against Bucky’s, and savoring the way that Bucky reaches for him even in sleep, pulling him close with a sigh. 

***

Despite the heat that had sparked between them that day in the meadow, and how Bucky’s body had arched into his as it grew toward something else before Steve stopped him, they don’t pick up there again in those first days. Even though they sleep tangled around each other, Bucky’s worries and Steve’s determination to hold him tight against the nightmares are enough to occupy them. 

In the daytime, in the garden, Steve still catches Bucky looking at him now an again with something else in his eyes—but it’s Bucky who usually looks away first, and so Steve lets him be. Many times, after a nightmare, Steve brushes his lips across Bucky’s temples, his cheeks, soothing him. Bucky always leans into the touch, seeming to crave it, but it’s too frightening in those moments to become anything more. 

Steve wonders if it’s fear that holds Bucky back from touching him again in that way—fear that it will make Steve pull away and that he’ll lose whatever it is that helps so much to have him in his bed. If he _knew_ that was what Bucky was thinking, he’d pull Bucky close among the flower beds and kiss him senseless. The wanting in the pit of his stomach hasn’t burned any lower than when it had ignited as Bucky kissed him the first time. 

But he’s not sure, and if there’s any chance _he_ might ruin the comfortable peace of their new arrangement, Steve can’t bring himself to risk it. Nothing is as important to him as doing what Bucky needs, and if all that is is a companion to watch over him as he sleeps—that’s what he’ll be. He thinks maybe he was right, that it was good not to do anything rash that day driven by the adrenaline of Bucky’s unexpected nightmare in the meadow. 

So he’s surprised, a few days after the morning he sent the letter as they’re kneeling side by side in the flower beds pulling green shoots of weeds from the soft soil, when Bucky reaches out an places his muddy hand over Steve’s. 

Steve goes still, glancing over at him. 

Bucky’s eyes are cast down, looking at their clasped, dirty hands, his lashes fanned out darkly over his pink cheeks. He flicks his gaze up at Steve, looking almost shy, and Steve sits back on the dirt to face him with their hands linked between them. 

Bucky rises higher on his knees, leaning toward him so that his hair falls in a chestnut wave over his shoulder. 

“Steve,” he says, softly, “can I?” 

Steve nods quickly, his heart picking up into an unsteady tempo. He tilts his face up toward Bucky, and Bucky frees his hand to wrap both in the front of Steve’s shirt—and he thinks distantly that he’ll have the print of them there from the dirt on Bucky’s hands. 

Bucky leans the rest of the way in, ghosting his lips over Steve’s at first, until Steve hums in his throat, and Bucky seals their mouths together firmly, taking full control of the kiss. 

It’s the opposite of the angle they’d been at before, and Bucky is shorter than Steve when they’re both standing—and Steve discovers that he is very much in favor of the shift, of Bucky over him, guiding Steve where he wants him. 

He angles his head back, and Bucky makes a noise in his throat that sends a zinging heat through Steve’s chest as Bucky pushes closer. Bucky flicks his tongue against Steve’s, and Steve inhales sharply, his arms coming up to twine around Bucky’s waist as the kiss deepens further, and Steve allows the unexpectedness to draw back the veil that he’s kept over just how much he’s being wanting this again. 

He’s breathing hard when Bucky pulls away from his mouth, trailing kisses down his jaw and up to nip at his earlobe, and Steve’s pretty sure Bucky could push him flat onto his back in the flower bed and he’d be powerless to resist (because he doesn’t want to). 

But the vigilant part of him that can’t quite stop considering everything makes him say, 

“Thomas is stacking firewood around the back,” 

“Mmm,” Bucky hums, grazing his teeth along the sensitive spot below Steve’s ear, to the hinge of his jaw, unconcerned. 

“He might see,” Steve adds, wanting to make sure Bucky at least understands what he’s getting at. 

“I don’t care,” Bucky says, low, moving to the other side and tracing the same path in reverse. “Do you?” 

Steve lets out a helpless puff of a half-laugh. “Depends on what you have in mind…” 

Bucky laughs too, and then sighs, sitting back on his heels and looking chagrined, and loosens his grip on Steve’s shirt a fraction. 

“No plan I’m afraid,” Bucky says, smiling wryly. “I just wanted to kiss you. I wasn’t sure if I was allowed.” 

“Always,” Steve says, sitting up straighter to kiss him again, swiftly. “I—I do want you, too. You can’t have already forgotten.” 

“That was before—” Bucky cuts himself off, shaking his head. 

“Before what?” Steve asks, a slight frown starting between his brows. 

Bucky shrugs, and looks down. “Before you’d quite seen everything I’m bringing to the table.” 

“I woke you up—from the nightmare in the meadow, before any of this happened—” Steve protests. 

Bucky shrugs again, and it hurts Steve’s heart to see him looking so doubtful. 

“It’s different—seeing how my nights are. Living with it.” 

“Not to me,” Steve says, firmly, reaching up to wrap his hands around Bucky’s. 

“I don’t want to ruin this,” Bucky says, eyes still fixed on their hands rather than meeting Steve’s. “I don’t want you to…” 

“To what?” Steve prompts him, squeezing his fingers. 

Bucky just smiles ruefully, shaking his head. “Nothing. I’m being stupid.” 

“No,” Steve says, gently, tilting in to kiss him again. Bucky closes his eyes into the kiss, but it doesn’t have the heat it had had a moment ago, some unspoken worry having apparently invaded his mind and taken him out of it again. 

Steve sighs, and kisses him one more time, breaking away to brush a strand of Bucky’s hair back behind his ear. 

“I’ll remind you,” he says. “Whenever you need me to.” 

Bucky smiles, sadly, but nods, searching Steve’s eyes with his pale ones. Suddenly he blinks rapidly, and looks away, and Steve’s heart cracks a little more seeing him fight whatever it is back all alone. 

“Promise you’ll let me?” Steve says. Bucky swallows hard, and nods again. 

They sit that way for a long while, in silence, Steve occasionally running a thumb over Bucky’s hand to remind him that he’s there, he’s there and he isn’t going anywhere. Eventually Bucky’s breathing evens out again, and he gives Steve a more real smile. 

“We should finish…with the weeds,” he says, with a hint of wry laughter returning finally to his eyes. 

Steve quirks his mouth, and flicks his eyes down Bucky’s body briefly, just enough for him to notice it. 

“I suppose,” he says. Bucky laughs, and pushes at his shoulder teasingly. 

“Lazy,” Bucky says, turning back to the half-weeded bed. 

“Mmm.” Steve hums in joking agreement. But he follows Bucky’s lead. 

Later, when they go up into the dark house for their dinner, he thinks Bucky looks more thoughtful than usual, and their meal is a quiet one. He can tell that Bucky is still holding something back, close to his chest, and that it has him on edge. So Steve once again pushes everything else away, trying to communicate to Bucky without words what he’d said in the garden—that Bucky isn’t going to ruin anything. He’s the one who stands first, and nods his head toward the bedroom door. 

“I’m sleepy tonight,” he says, easily. _I’ll sleep beside you just the same, the rest doesn’t change that_ , he hopes Bucky hears. 

Bucky looks surprised, but nods quickly, getting up to follow him. “Me too,” he says. 

They undress and climb into bed together the same as they’ve done for over a week of preceding nights, and Steve doesn’t wait to see if there will be anything tentative about how Bucky approaches him tonight. He pulls him close as soon as he’s crawled under the comforter, and they both sigh as they slot into place. 

Steve wasn’t lying, when he’d said he was tired tonight. They’d worked hard in the garden today, with the ever strengthening spring sun—tipping into summer, really—beating down on them. So he relaxes quickly into the familiar feeling of Bucky wrapped up in his arms, and almost just as quickly feels sleep stealing over him. 

He wakes with a start, some time later, to the feeling of Bucky shifting restlessly. 

The sky outside isn’t light yet, but it’s gone the deep pearly blue that tells him it’s nearly time when the sun will begin nipping at the edges of it. 

Bucky groans, a shuddering, pained sound, and bolts upright, bringing Steve all the way to alert consciousness as he sits up too. 

“Bucky?” He whispers, squeezing his shoulder. There’s no response. He gives Bucky’s shoulder a little shake, and Bucky jerks out of his grasp. 

It usually takes a little time to bring Bucky out of one of his nightmares, and Steve knows now not to try to force it too quickly—that leaves Bucky more shaken than ever, and less trusting that he’s really awake when it does happen. Steve slides his hand from Bucky’s shoulder to grip at his fingers, squeezing them tight. 

“Bucky,” he says, soothingly, “Bucky, wake up—” 

Bucky’s head whips around to stare at him, and Steve feels his own face go cold. Bucky’s eyes are black, blacker than just the dim light of the room would make them—and he stares back at Steve unseeingly, a terrifying, cold expression on his face. Bucky’s fingers are like ice. 

“Bucky,” Steve says, more urgently, sitting forward to swing his feet around. 

Bucky pulls out of his grasp, darting faster than Steve could have anticipated from the bed. Steve leaps to his feet, too, thrashing a little to free himself of the tangle of sheets. But Bucky stops in the open floor at the center of the room, his head weaving a bit as he looks around himself—and Steve can only guess what he’s seeing. 

Steve approaches him cautiously. Bucky hadn’t sleepwalked since that first time Steve had seen him in the garden, not since Steve has been sharing a bed with him certainly, and he’s not sure what’s different tonight to have made it happen. He doesn’t know if he should take his usual tack, or if this means that Bucky is so much deeper in the grasp of the nightmare that he has to act more forcefully to bring him back. 

A blast of freezing air sweeps through the room, chilling him. Steve’s eyes dart to the window, where their white curtains are absolutely still—no evidence of a breeze pouring in from the window—and then looks back even more alarmed at Bucky as the frigid air swirls and eddies around them. 

Bucky’s shoulders hunch, and he seems to curl in on himself, with a low, animal sound coming from somewhere deep in his chest. 

The room seems to darken even further, and Steve can see that the hearth grate, where a low glow of embers had been shining a moment ago, is now out entirely. A crash startles Steve’s eyes away from Bucky, to where their vaseful of flowers has fallen from the window sill onto the ground—and he sees with horror that the flowers, which they’d picked just that afternoon, have all gone black, just like the rosebuds. 

That snaps Steve out of his indecision—he throws himself forward, spinning Bucky around and flinging his arms around him. Bucky’s entire body feels like ice, and it almost freezes Steve’s skin where he touches him, but Steve holds him tighter. 

Bucky’s body feels coiled tight like a spring, and he whips his head back and forth, the eyes that aren’t really his eyes wide and staring past Steve’s shoulder—Steve lets out a hopeless noise. Bucky has never been so deep before where Steve couldn’t call him out of it, or shake him free, but Bucky is thrashing in his arms now, trying to free himself of Steve’s grip, eyes wide and blank—

He presses his forehead to Bucky’s, even though it hurts, it hurts where he’s touching him, and hears himself chanting Bucky’s name, begging him—

“ _Bucky, Bucky, Bucky_ , come back, please wake up, Bucky—” 

He puts his hands on either side of Bucky’s face, and kisses him hard, lips searing with the cold of Bucky’s mouth. 

Bucky gasps, a sound like a breaking seal, and slumps, going still and boneless in Steve’s arms, heavily enough that Steve nearly stumbles, holding him up. 

A sob tears out of Bucky, and his body seems to come back to life, his hands clutching at Steve the way he had that first time, like Steve is a life raft that might keep him from drowning. 

Bucky looks up, and his eyes are full of fear and confusion and glistening tears, but they’re his eyes, pale blue, and Steve also chokes on a wrenched-out sob of relief to see it as he gathers Bucky more steadily into his arms. 

“ _Steve_ ,” Bucky manages to rasp, “I was—something happened—” 

“Shhh, shhh, I know, I’m here, I have you,” Steve says, not really thinking about the words but just wanting to comfort Bucky, whose body has now started to shake violently in the aftermath of whatever that was. 

“I can’t—I’m afraid—” Bucky sobs, burrowing impossibly deeper against Steve’s chest, suddenly seeming very small. 

“I’ve got you, I have you.” 

It takes Bucky a long time to calm down after that, even after Steve coaxes him back to sit on the edge of the bed, wrapping a blanket around his shoulders and rubbing his fingers until they have some warmth in them again. And then it takes another while after Bucky notices the blackened flowers among the shards of the broken vase. He jumps up, pacing in a little, frantic circle like a caged animal, and Steve walks with him, speaking low in his ear until Bucky can stop again. 

Bucky finally sags into Steve’s side, but Steve can see that his eyes are still being drawn to the floor—the evidence looking more and more stark as the steely grey of pre-dawn begins to illuminate it. 

“Bucky, come with me, we’ll go down to the garden, we don’t have to stay in here,” Steve suggests, running his fingers through Bucky’s hair, trying to take his attention from the ruined stalks. 

Bucky shakes his head, fearfully, “I can’t, the garden, I—look what I did, I can’t—” 

“No, Bucky,” Steve says, firmly as he can, “it won’t happen again, not right now, you’re safe—” 

“ _Nothing is safe_ ,” Bucky says, wildly, turning to grip Steve’s shoulders, “nothing is safe from _me_ Steve—” 

Steve squares his shoulders, meeting Bucky’s eyes steadily. “Look at me. I’m safe. I was right here beside you and I’m safe.” 

Bucky doesn’t look convinced, but he also at least looks less certain of the threat he might pose, so Steve takes that as a good sign. He runs his hands down Bucky’s arms, grounding and warming him as best he can through the thin nightshirt. 

“Get your cloak and boots,” he says, in a voice that he hopes brooks no denial. “We don’t need to stay in here. We’ll get some air, clear our heads.” 

Bucky nods, but doesn’t move either, looking utterly drained. So Steve steps quickly around him, pulling clothes from the wardrobe, and shuffling Bucky into them as best he can. It’s not particularly cold, now, but Bucky’s cheeks are still pale, so Steve wraps him up as if it were midwinter before dressing himself hastily and with much less care. When he puts his arm around Bucky’s shoulder and guides him toward the door, Bucky doesn’t resist, allowing himself be led meekly. 

They descend into the light mist still hovering around the feet of the trees in the garden, and Bucky tilts his head back as soon as they’re out of doors, taking in deep, heaving breaths. 

Steve sets an easy pace, never taking his arm from Bucky’s shoulders, and they make a meandering path through the flower beds as the light grows by degrees. 

With it, Bucky seems finally to come back to himself, and as they enter the long lane between the fruit trees, he turns and blinks up at Steve, his eyes clear—if still troubled. 

“What happened?” He asks, sounding as if he’s trying to keep his voice steady. 

“You had a nightmare,” Steve replies, simply. “That seemed to hold you tighter than most.” 

“And the—the vase? The flowers?” Bucky presses. 

Steve swallows. “The room—when you got up, the room got very cold. I don’t know why. The flowers fell and they—were like that.” 

Bucky shudders, leaning his face into Steve’s shoulder as they continue walking slowly between the trees. 

“The curse…” he starts, a little muffled in Steve’s cloak. “Then it _was_ me, that night in the garden—”

“It’s not _you_ Bucky,” Steve interrupts him, forcefully. “This curse isn’t _you_.” 

Bucky doesn’t answer, he just raises his eyes to the pink of sunrise beginning to caress the tops of the leaves above them. 

“Come’ere,” Steve says, guiding him down the end of the lane, where the orderly fruit trees spill into the less orderly edge of the wood, tucked up against the white garden walls. 

He leads Bucky to a place where a fallen tree has begun to return to the earth, covered over in moss. He turns Bucky and nudges him to sit down and lean against it, and Bucky obeys. 

“Wait here,” he says, turning quickly to the last fruit tree—a plum, from which they’ve begun to be able to gather ripe fruit in the last few days. Steve collects a handful of the dark purple fruit, and brings it back to Bucky, sitting beside him and offering one. 

“Eat something. You’re still pale,” he says, waiting until he sees Bucky lift the fruit to his mouth for a hesitant bite before sinking his teeth into one himself. The juice is tart and brightly cold in the morning air, but the plum is ripe and sweet and it grounds Steve, a little. Bucky closes his eyes as he takes a second bite, and Steve hopes it’s doing the same for him. 

They finish their plums in silence, discarding the pits into the bracken behind them. Bucky’s cheeks at last have some color in them, mirroring the sunrise now fully in effect overhead. 

“I’m sorry, Steve,” Bucky says, quietly, breaking the silence. 

“For what?” Steve asks, reaching for his hand. Bucky’s fingers skitter away from his, and he frowns at the crown of Bucky’s bowed head. He reaches out again, very deliberately, and takes Bucky’s hand in his. 

“For tonight. For everything,” Bucky says, tone flat. “I—I didn’t want—for you to be afraid of me.” 

“ _Bucky_ ,” Steve says, on a whoosh of breath. Is this what Bucky hadn’t said, yesterday in the flower beds? That he was afraid that Steve might come to fear him? It aches in his chest. “I will _never_ be afraid of you.” 

Bucky laughs, an odd sound. “Never?” It’s clear he doesn’t believe it. 

Steve shakes his head, and puts his hand to Bucky’s jaw, forcing him to meet his eyes. 

“ _Never_ ,” he says, holding Bucky’s gaze. 

Bucky just stares back at him for a long moment, lips parted. 

Finally, something that isn’t quite a smile, but at least has echoes of one, softens his face. 

“You aren’t afraid of me,” Bucky repeats, almost to himself, like he’s turning it over in his mind. 

Steve shakes his head. “No.” 

Bucky bites his lip. Then he looks away, toward the dappled green dimness of the woods. 

“Can we walk some more?” He asks. 

“Of course,” Steve says, moving at once to stand, and turning to offer Bucky a hand up. 

He hopes that isn’t the end of the conversation—but he can see the weariness on Bucky’s face. They don’t have to continue to discuss it now, when the mantle of the long night is still hanging on his shoulders. 

They wander deeper into the woods, without paying much attention to the direction. Thanks to the slope of valley and the encircling white walls, it’s impossible ever to be fully lost out here—so Steve figures it doesn’t matter much that they pay attention to where their feet carry them.

Bucky grows a little more settled as they wind between oaks and birches and pine, crossing a meadow when they break through the trees, then finding the woods again, a gently rustling ceiling. 

His face has grown pensive again, Steve notices. He wonders if Bucky’s mind is circling the same track of thoughts that Steve’s are—worrying about the dream, and what it had meant, and what they can do about it. 

Eventually they follow the cheerful sound of a brook, tucked down into a bank of ferns, and they walk alongside it for a while, deeper into the trees, allowing it to set their wandering track for a time. 

Bucky reaches out and takes Steve’s hand in his, surprising Steve at first, but then he tucks Bucky’s fingers into the crook of his elbow, pulling him so that they can walk closer, side by side. Bucky hums thoughtfully, looking down at his hand against the bright white sleeve of Steve’s shirt, but doesn’t say what he’s thinking. He does, however, tip his head for a moment to rest on Steve’s shoulder, until they have to pick their way around a tumble of a fallen tree. 

As they come over the top of it, the earth drops away a little, and the creek widens into a dark pool, just the barest hint of ripples dancing over the surface to indicate that there’s still a current at all. They climb down the little ledge of earth onto the flat ground beside it, covered over in moss and soft grass, and Bucky pauses, eyes following the path of the stream at the far end where it disappears again around a curve. 

There’s a furtive restlessness in Bucky, Steve can feel as he steps away from him, but Steve waits for Bucky to decide if he’s going to share the reason for it with him. After another quiet moment, Bucky turns, hands hanging loose at his sides. 

“What are we going to do, Steve?” 

Steve takes a steadying breath, and squares his shoulders. 

“Whatever it takes,” he says. 

He knows he’s starting to repeat himself. But he doesn’t know any better way to reassure Bucky than these phrases that he feels in his bones.

Bucky just regards him for a long moment, and Steve wonders what it is that he sees—or is looking for. Then Bucky takes a small step toward him again. 

“Steve…” he says, again, trailing off. 

“Yes Bucky?” Steve asks, feeling the words catching unaccountably in his throat. Bucky lifts his eyes to Steve’s again, and this time there’s a softness at the edges of them, a look Steve’s caught once or twice in the garden, but never on purpose, never when Bucky knew he was looking back. 

“You aren’t afraid of me,” Bucky says, low. 

And this time it sounds like he means to say something else—like it’s a stand in for what he really intends. Steve wants to find out what it is, what Bucky really wants to say—but before he can formulate the question Bucky’s expression shifts again, quicksilver eyes flickering down to Steve’s lips, and Steve loses his grasp on the words at the something new in Bucky’s eyes. 

“Buck,” Steve breathes, cheeks suddenly warm. 

“Yes,” Bucky says back, barely a whisper. 

Then he’s moving, his hand on the center of Steve’s chest, pushing Steve backward until his knees hit the edge of the little embankment and he sits heavily, Bucky’s eyes intent and never leaving his. Steve leans back, slightly, and Bucky presses forward, climbing into his lap, knees on either side of him. Steve’s hands fly to Bucky’s waist to hold him there, and Bucky’s hands come up to cup Steve’s face—gentle at first, and then twining tightly into his hair as Bucky dips his head to kiss him. 

This time, there’s no hesitation. Bucky kisses him deep from the moment their lips meet, Steve already gasping into his mouth as they share breath. Bucky keeps one hand in the back of Steve’s hair, and the other drifts down so that his thumb brushes at the hollow of Steve’s throat, pressing at the spot where his pulse is leaping. 

Sensations assail Steve as he tries to drink it all in—the damp moss beneath him, Bucky’s weight pressing him into the soft earth, the babble of the creek dropping into the pool and the chatter of birds, the prickle of sweat between his shoulder blades as the heat builds with their bodies pressed close together even in the dim coolness of the forest. And he feels something in him sighing, unfurling itself toward Bucky like a blossom opening in the sun. 

Beneath Bucky, he feels his limbs loosening, his edges blurring into Bucky’s as Bucky goes liquid in his lap, Bucky’s lines melting to meet him. 

Their kisses go long and languid, stretching and lingering with all the time in the world. It’s bright day, and the woods are deep and feel like shelter, a protective embrace of branches woven around to shield them, to give them this. 

Bucky pulls back just a little, lips still just brushing against Steve’s as they both pant. Bucky blinks hazily down at him, eyes hooded, and finally he relinquishes his grip on Steve’s hair, sliding his hands down to run his thumbs along the sharp curve of Steve’s jaw, landing at his chin to tip his face up. Steve’s breath ghosts over his wet lower lip, and he shivers both at the feeling and at the hunger and the wonder in Bucky’s eyes as he searches Steve’s face. 

Something seems to snap, and Bucky dives back in, plundering Steve’s mouth like he wants to consume him whole, like he wants to crawl inside of him, and Steve moans helplessly. 

Bucky breaks away with a sharp breath at the sound, and his head drops back as he instead rocks his hips tentatively against Steve’s. Steve has been floating, letting himself get drunk on Bucky’s mouth, not thinking a moment beyond each new kiss—but now he can feel how Bucky is growing hard against him and Steve’s body responds with an answering jolt of desire. He drops his hands from Bucky’s waist to press against his hipbones, keeping him in place and grinding up against him. 

“We can,” Bucky says, voice breathless, as he continues to rock slowly against Steve, “We should…” 

“Uh huh,” Steve manages, already aching for Bucky to touch him everywhere, anywhere. “Whatever you want.” 

Bucky makes a little noise in his throat, and bends his head to lick into Steve’s mouth again, long and heated. 

Steve is drifting again by the end of it, his mind too sluggish to realize what’s happening when Bucky slides from his lap in a fluid motion, settling to his knees in the V of Steve’s legs. Steve sits up a little straighter, propping himself up with both hands in the spongey moss behind him—but he’s quickly knocked down to his elbows with a groan as Bucky rubs his cheek, catlike, over Steve’s thigh, lips dragging open over the fabric of his breeches, and Steve’s body arcs toward him. 

Bucky runs shaky hands up Steve’s legs, thumbing at the inseam in the soft, fawn colored material, disguising little with the way Steve is sprawled open for him. Bucky pauses a moment, and Steve blinks down at him—he looks like he might say something, and it makes Steve pull his mind back for a moment, too, thinking about what it is that they’re doing. But even focusing as best he can, for a rare moment he can’t bring himself to feel any doubt that whatever they can share between them feels right. After a moment, Bucky drops his eyes again, and his fingers continue their track—lighting on the buttons of Steve’s breeches to work them open, fumbling but not hesitating. 

Steve lifts his hips as Bucky helps him to shimmy the fabric down his thighs, the moss cool and damp where his shirt is rucked up at his back now. 

He’s hard and flushed when Bucky wraps his hand around him, tentatively at first, and then firmer, stroking up his length and making him shudder with the sparks it sends through his blood. And Bucky’s mouth is already red and shiny, his lips swollen from kissing, and when he dips his head to wrap them around Steve he can’t look away, it’s the best thing he’s ever seen. 

Bucky’s hair isn’t its usual tidy style. Since they’d come down here straight from bed it’s loose around his face, and as he bends his head to take Steve deeper into his mouth, his hand still gripping lightly at the base, it falls in a curtain around him. Steve reaches out, running his fingers through the silky strands, pushing it back from Bucky’s face so he can keep looking. 

Bucky works him down slowly, his mouth soft and wet and hot around him, and he starts smoothing his hands up and down Steve’s thighs in stuttering little circles. Steve holds himself as still as he can, anchored with one hand in Bucky’s hair, not applying any pressure but just feeling the movement of Bucky’s jaw and the shifting motion of his skull under his fingertips. 

Bucky hums in his throat, and arches his neck into Steve’s touch, his mouth getting bolder as he maps Steve with his tongue, slowly at first and then more insistent. 

Steve can feel the pressure building low in his stomach, the muscles in his abdomen jumping as Bucky picks up his pace. Steve groans with the effort not to thrust into Bucky’s mouth, and presses his fingertips just a fraction harder against the nape of Bucky’s neck, a wordless plea. And Bucky seems to understand—he brings his hand back to stroke him too, dropping his mouth open wide and loose as he bobs faster—

Steve’s fingers clutch convulsively in Bucky’s hair, and Bucky pulls back, not quite all the way, as Steve comes with a punched out breathlessness echoing through his entire ribcage. 

Bucky swallows, and then swipes at his face with the back of his sleeve, reappearing with his lips curled in a smirk from behind it as he watches Steve try unsuccessfully to catch his breath lying flat on his back in the greenery. 

Steve gathers his wits about him quicker than he settles his lungs though, not wanting to leave Bucky looking quite so collected when he’s a trembling mess. He slides down off the bank, crowding into Bucky’s space and pulling him bodily onto his lap again, already reaching for the front of Bucky’s breeches as Bucky makes a little _mmph_ of pleasure at the new arrangement. Steve surges forward and kisses him messily as he gets a hand around him—he’s too uncoordinated to be deft about it, he just wants to see Bucky come too, wants Bucky to shiver apart under his hands. 

He jerks him fast and mercilessly, and soon Bucky is letting out ragged little moans on every thrust of his hips into Steve’s fist curled around him. He isn’t kissing Steve back any more, his lips pliant and open against Steve’s mouth—and he goes very still when he comes, eyes closed and breath hot across Steve’s cheek with one final groan as he shudders apart. 

Bucky drops his head to Steve’s shoulder, the rest of him sagging into Steve’s chest as he comes down, with a weak, muffled laugh into the fabric of Steve’s shirt. 

“Are you…happy?” Steve asks, his arm going around Bucky’s waist to hold him there, the other hand coming up to pet over Bucky’s tousled hair. His voice feels rumbly and distant in his own chest, like he isn’t quite back in his own body yet. 

“Mmm,” Bucky hums, rubbing his nose up Steve’s neck, giving him a little prickle of goosebumps in its wake. “All these nights you’ve been taking me to bed. If I hadn’t been such a coward it could have been like this.” 

“Not a coward,” Steve says, fingers combing deeper, working through the tangles in Bucky’s hair. But there isn’t much heat in the statement—later, he’ll remind Bucky of the conversation they had earlier. He’ll remind Bucky every way he can think of that the darkness that has maybe sometimes threatened to come between them isn’t any of Bucky’s making, it’s not _him_. Right now he’s too contented, and Bucky too sweet and loose-limbed and relaxed in his arms for him to pursue it. “But I’ll take you to bed any way you like. We never have to leave if you want.” 

Bucky chuckles, and then sits up a little straighter, looking ruefully at the sticky mess on Steve’s hand and belly smeared between them. 

“Yeugh,” he says, with a comical frown, plucking at the hem of Steve’s shirt, which hadn’t been spared either, “we have to leave it sometime to wash, or things are going to get disgusting. I’m not fond of the idea of leaving this in the hamper for Matilda or Agnes to deal with.”

Steve smiles, tucking a lock of Bucky’s hair behind his ear carefully, still just enjoying being able to touch him like this, like it’s the easiest thing in the world, like he’s always had permission. 

He looks around, and then grins. “You want to clean up before we go back? Here.” He sits up, and tugs his shirt off over his head, tossing it across the grass to the edge of the little pool, the sleeve unfurling into the water. “It’s warm. What do you think of a swim before we start home?” 

Bucky beams at him with approval, and nods, standing up (on knees that Steve is pleased to see are still unsteady) before pulling off his own shirt, and shucking his open breeches to the ground as well. 

The pool is deep and bone-jarringly cold, the stream feeding it still holding the memory of having been snow somewhere earlier in its life. 

Steve slips into it first, his back to Bucky as he feels all of his skin seize up at the feeling—but he turns to Bucky with as even an expression as he can muster, and a smile, and says, “Feels amazing!” 

It’s worth it when Bucky doesn’t bother to ease himself in, just leaps from the edge of the grass into the middle with a splash, coming up with a startled whoop and a shocked expression as he whirls on Steve, arms pushing at the water to keep him afloat. 

“You _ass_!” He yells, laughing. And then Steve thinks maybe it _wasn’t_ worth it, because Bucky propels himself with surprising speed toward where he clings to the edge, and he tries to escape but he’s laughing too hard to resist as Bucky places strong hands on his shoulders and ducks him below the surface. 

They clamber out hastily after that, each trying to push the other back as they claw away from the bracing cold of the water. Steve hastily dunks his shirt into it, scrubbing it along a rock until it’s at least clean enough not to be obvious what got it dirty in the first place, and they gather the rest of their clothes in their arms and run naked between the trees until they find a clearing where the sun is blazing down unobstructed. 

Steve flings his cloak out over the grass in the center of the sunshine, and they both flop onto it on their backs, their skin pink and glistening from the chilly water, to let the light dry them. 

Slowly their teeth stop threatening to chatter, and their skin grows warm again, only their hair still wet from the swim. Bucky fans his out around his head, trying to let the air get to it, and Steve just runs his fingers through his shorter locks, already more damp than wet in the bright day. 

They lie there, talking quietly, as if keeping secrets from the trees, until the sun shifts again, the shadows lengthening over their little patch of sunshine. And then they dress, lacing their fingers together as they point themselves back in the direction of the house. 

Matilda is coming down the front steps as they finally come up the garden path, and Steve’s fingers twitch—but Bucky wraps his hand up tighter, and doesn’t let go, and Steve feels something settling inside himself at the gesture. 

Steve watches as Matilda’s gaze drops to their linked hands, and rove over Bucky’s wild hair and Steve’s still sopping shirt, her face impassive. Then she looks up again and says, 

“I’m glad I planned a hot lunch today. Go upstairs and get dry and I’ll have it on the table in a moment.”

Bucky turns to him, a brilliant grin flashing across his face, and Steve’s face breaks into an answering smile, his chest soaring—and they trip up the stairs past Matilda into the welcoming warmth of the house, holding hands the whole way. 

***

It feels as if the final piece of the domesticity they’ve been dancing around since the beam first slammed shut on the garden gates finally clicks into place. 

They work in the garden, and walk in the woods, and eat their meals as often as they can under the shade of the fruit trees—and when they go to their bed together they find new ways to make sure they both fall asleep with bodies too tired to dream, or as much as such a thing is possible. 

The house seems to burst with it, the new completeness that they can’t seem to contain. The garden embraces the arrival of summer with a riot of roses, exploding from their beds and climbing up the garden walls and over their trellises. Matilda sings in the kitchen, in a clear, high voice that neither of them have heard before, and Thomas even smiles now and again when they meet him outdoors. They finally even catch a glimpse of the invisible Agnes, a spare, angular girl with bare feet and a startled expression who nonetheless bobs a polite curtsey and gives them a nervous smile before disappearing again into the family’s part of the house where Steve and Bucky do not go. 

They go back to the little pool in the woods, one day when they’ve been pruning the rebellious and enthusiastic roses back into some kind of order in the punishingly hot sun. The water is still too cold to stay in for long, but they clean away the grime of their work. And then they dirty themselves up again stretched out on a blanket in the grass, and have to do it all over. 

Bucky still dreams, sometimes, despite everything Steve can do to prevent it. But he doesn’t sleepwalk again, never goes so far beyond reach that Steve can’t bring him back with a gentle touch. 

Steve doesn’t keep track of the days, though he’d been so vigilant about it before. He’d felt it was the least of his duty that he could do to keep a log of them—but these days aren’t anything he could commit to paper, even if he wanted to, even if it were just for himself and not a soldier’s report. They’re too full, stretching at the seams with so many delicious things he could never do justice in words. 

So it’s a surprise to him, when he stumbles out of their bedroom one fine, clear summer morning, to see a letter propped against a pitcher overflowing with yellow and pink roses. 

He recognizes his mother’s handwriting, even across the dim space of the room, and he crosses to snatch it up at once. 

For some reason, he feels the need for privacy to open it. He glances around the living chamber, knowing Bucky won’t be up for some time yet, then slips silently into his own unused bedroom, shutting the door carefully behind him. 

_My Steven_ , begins the letter, and for a half a moment Steve just enjoys the sight of the page filled with his mother’s precise, looping hand. 

_Oh my darling, it’s good to hear from you. You’re right, I have heard the rumors, and I’ve been worried that perhaps you were unaware of just the kind of danger you might be in, even with the veneer of comfort. But I should have given you more credit, my smart, brave boy. I wish that there was more I could tell you, that I could solve this mystery. It pains my mother’s heart to receive your request for help and to be able to offer so little of it. Still, I will tell you what I can, even if it is small enough and maybe adds to the questions rather than answering them._

_I have tried to look in on you, as I’ve done so many times when you were away, and after I received your letter I tried also to See anything of the Prince. But my glass remained dark—no one seems able to See past whatever veil surrounds him, and many with more powerful magic than I have have tried. Whatever magic hangs over him is too strong to See through, the only vision that appears is the one Pierce allows us to See, of a kingdom blackened and charred. But last night, I tried again—this time I didn’t use my usual glass, but the hand mirror you painted for me before you left home. I could still See nothing of Prince James, but as I tried, the veil seemed to thin a little—like peering through a dark hedge—and I could See you. The darkness of Pierce’s vision remained, surrounding you. But you stood tall in the center of it, a light of your own, though the darkness did its best to clutch at you and remove you from my Sight._

_I wish I knew what it meant for you, my sweet boy. I wish I could tell you precisely what it is you need to do. But I don’t. I only know that if I was somehow able to See you even through the curse—which no one’s power, even combined, has been able to break—it is because I did not See thanks to the power of my magic, but my love for you. You are the thing I have always been able to See clearly, and that love is a force of habit stronger than magic. I believe that if there is any hope for Prince James, it will be of the same kind—power cannot match Pierce’s power, but there might be a way still._

_You are at the center of this, Steven, for reasons I don’t understand but can’t doubt. If you care for him, be brave, and let yourself continue to care. This is the only advice I can give you and I hope it will be enough. I think whatever is coming, it will be soon._

_If love makes any difference in whatever you are to face, remember that you have all of mine._

_Sarah_

Steve lets the letter flutter to his lap as he sags into his chair, mind and heart humming with his mother’s words. 

He’d told her that he cares for Bucky, and hoped she would understand. Now he thinks that she’d seen more clearly what he meant than he’d even realized when he’d written it. 

_Love_ is a word that tastes like magic on his tongue, and he whispers it aloud into the stillness of the room. 

He _loves_ Bucky. Has loved him for some time, he thinks. It had grown from something like surprised fondness in those first days in the garden, slowly enough that he hadn’t realized that the small seedling of it had stretched and strengthened into a full grown oak, its roots twining sturdy and deep all the way through him. 

Steve would do anything for Bucky, to save him from this darkness. And if all he has to do is love him—Steve thinks it might be the easiest task he could have been given. 

But he isn’t sure if it’s enough. Maybe, for it to make any difference, Bucky needs to love him, too. And he can’t be as bone sure of that. 

He has Bucky’s friendship, his affection, his gratitude. Steve believes that since the night Bucky had sleepwalked, he even has his trust. 

But more? Bucky’s reliance on him, the fact that he needs him and wants him near, those are sure. But Steve doesn’t know if they amount to the kind of love Steve feels for him—the kind that wouldn’t change even if Bucky’s curse were lifted tomorrow and they could both return to whatever life they want. Maybe things would be different for Bucky, if he didn’t _have_ to depend on Steve as the only companion of his lonely exile. 

Outside of his door, he hears the sounds of Bucky stirring in their—in _Bucky’s_ —bedroom. 

Steve stows the letter from Sarah away in the back of one of the cubbies in his writing desk, shuffling a few pages of blank parchment in front to conceal it. 

Then he pads softly back into the outer chamber, shutting the door behind him noiselessly, as his mind continues to hum. 

Letting himself love Bucky is easy. 

Letting himself love Bucky might be the hardest thing he’s ever done. 

Steve lets himself back into their bedroom, where Bucky is dressing in the morning sun, his hair and face rumpled from the pillows, and Steve strides across to him and swoops Bucky into his arms, kissing his surprised but pleased face. Bucky raises his eyebrows when Steve breaks away, his mouth tipped up in a questioning smile—but Steve just shakes his head. 

His mother is right—he just needs to be brave.

***


	7. Connected

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More letters, more dreams, more love.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We are loving your comments so much, just wanted you all to know!!

Steve has a scar on his right shoulder where the sword he’d told Bucky about had once pierced it, between his collarbone and the joint—just a shiny white star of healed tissue, raised enough that Bucky can find it with his fingertips even in the dark. 

It’s knowledge he couldn’t have had before, and he stores it up, memorizing each secret detail of Steve’s body to recite to himself like a spell against the magic that still stalks his sleeping hours. 

It’s nearing midsummer, when the sun lingers seemingly as long as it wants to in the sky, and sometimes they take to eating even their dinners out of doors in the balmy twilights. 

There’s still plenty of work for them to do during the lengthening summer days in the garden. While the roses and summer fruits and vegetables have exploded into enthusiastic growth, so have the weeds, seeking their share of the light and water and carefully tended soil. The ones that are left aren’t any half-hearted weak shoots of clover either—it’s the tenacious tendrils of plants used to fighting for their survival, and Steve and Bucky battle them back from the tender shoots of their lovingly cultivated tomatoes and onions and blackberries protectively. 

And there are still new things to plant, too—a few weeks ago they’d raided the garden shed for pots and trays and seeds, and now they have rows of hopeful seedlings ready to be given a proper home in the ground. Some of the seeds and bulbs had been labelled on their shelves, but some of the jars had not, and Bucky had decided they’d better plant them anyway. Now he and Steve lift them carefully from their little pots, speculating as best they can about what they look like they’ll be when they’re full grown. 

“These ones are peas I think…or beans maybe,” Steve says, lifting a cracked clay pot as he kneels beside Bucky in front of a newly turned garden bed they’d prepared for the purpose, and eyeing the little green leaves speculatively. “See the little curls of it?” 

“Hmm,” Bucky says, noncommittally. The truth is despite his newfound love of all things green and growing, he still knows less than Steve about the ins and outs of the plants. He picks up another of their trays and peers at the furling sprouts, and then sniffs delicately at the lacy edge of a leaf. “I think this is another tomato,” he says, “lets do those in a row here on the left.” 

Steve nods, and passes him another of the larger seedlings that they _know_ to be a tomato, or at least that was labelled as one in its jar. 

Bucky shuffles forward, humming to himself, and starts scooping handfuls of dirt out in a little row, awaiting new inhabitants, and Steve moves beside him in tandem, placing little pots beside the holes. 

The sun is hot today, blazing high overhead, and Bucky pauses at the end of the row, rocking back on his heels to wipe away a trickle of sweat prickling across his forehead with his sleeve. 

Steve smiles at him from where his hands are buried in one of their trays of seedlings, delicately lifting out one of the green shoots, roots and dirt cupped gently in both hands. Bucky holds his own out, and Steve sets the backs of his hands carefully into Bucky’s palms to transfer the fragile thing between them. 

They work their way down the rows like that, steadily and without much conversation needed, and Bucky thinks how satisfying this part is. Not that there isn’t something satisfying about yanking weeds or pruning roses, but this part—the setting down of new growth in anticipation of fruit and vegetables and flowers yet to come in the season—it’s the part he likes the best. He feels something soothing in being—if not quite in _control_ of the life they’re fostering—at least productive in helping it along in a way that wouldn’t have happened if he’d never turned his attention toward it. 

It almost makes him grateful to be here, cut off from everything he was and did before. He wonders for maybe the thousandth time if he’d be able to give it up—if he were suddenly free to return to the way things were. The more he asks himself the question the more he’s afraid of the answer, not because he isn’t sure—but because he is. It’s an emphatic _no_ , which scares him, because he isn’t sure it’s an answer he’d be allowed to give. 

He’s surprised out of his thoughts by Steve, leaning over to wipe a long streak of mud down the side of his cheek. 

“Guh!” Bucky says, glaring at Steve, who grins back mischievously. 

“You’re thinking too hard,” Steve says, brushing his muddy fingertips off on his breeches. 

Bucky snorts. “You of all people should remember I don’t take kindly to that kind of thing, you might get an disproportional response.” 

Steve laughs, “What? You’re going to wallow around in here and ruin all our hard work just to dirty me up a little? You’d never.” 

“Hmph,” Bucky says, tossing his head, “as if you weren’t ready to throw down the gauntlet with both of us and beat Charles senseless with a broom at that point.” 

“Maybe,” Steve says, darkly, “sort of wish I had anyway, sometimes.” 

“He deserved it,” Bucky agrees, sitting back on his haunches. “You know he left the royal city only a couple of years after that?” 

“Hmm,” Steve says, vaguely. 

“Some trouble with a girl—he was a rotten apple. But his father was a good man and when whatever it was came out he took the girl’s side, or at least that’s what I heard. He disinherited Charles in favor of his younger brother and sent him back to his uncle to learn how to manage the farms. Can’t really imagine him doing manual labor but I like to try. I wish I knew the full story though.” 

“Mm,” Steve says again, vaguely. Bucky sharpens his gaze on him, catching something knowing underneath Steve’s wordless replies. Steve sees him looking, and finally shrugs one shoulder, corner of his mouth tipping up. 

“Guess I may have heard something about it,” Steve says. “He got to be pretty well known for bothering any of the servants pretty enough to catch his eye—most of us knew about it and kept a watch out for him as much as we could. One night he met a girl in the gardens on her own, and decided he could do what he liked. Unfortunately for him she wasn’t a servant—she was a squire out of uniform, training for the guard. She beat him to a pulp, succeeding in ignoring his title where I once failed I’m pleased to say, and when he went crying to his father for her to be punished for it he found to his surprise that his father waited to hear both sides of the story. And he didn’t much care for Charles’ side. You know the rest from there.” 

Bucky gapes at him, both horrified and a little delighted by the story. “And the girl? You knew her—? She wasn’t hurt?” 

Steve shakes his head, idly tossing a bit of root out of the bed in front of him. “She was a friend, a bit younger than us. She said the worst of it was he got blood on her clean shirt.”

Bucky laughs, and then shudders. “I’m glad when he made his move it was against someone who could protect themself.” 

“Me too,” Steve says. “And that his father wasn’t as rotten as he was. I hope the younger son is a better man.” 

Bucky tries to remember if he’d known the boy. But he would have been too young for them to know much of each other back in the days when Bucky spent any time around Charles. He hopes he’s better than Charles had been shaping up to be too. 

After a few more moments of silence, Bucky sighs, tipping forward again to lean over their work.

“I got a letter today,” Steve says, as they settle to their knees on the other side of the garden bed, beginning the process from the other side with a new seedling tray, onions this time. 

“Oh?” Bucky says, a bit absently, as he tamps the dirt tighter around a freshly planted stem. 

He knows Steve writes now and then to his friends still out in the world. Bucky feels a little guilty himself for how neglectful he is of his own correspondence—it’s not that he doesn’t want to hear from his mother and father and Rebecca, it’s just that he forgets that he ought to sit down and tell them something of himself in return, that they must be worried. And when he does remember, it’s hard to think of what to say—his days feel so full now, with Steve, and yet the fullness of them escapes him when he tries to think how to describe to them just what it is that’s been occupying his time here. 

“Hmm,” Steve hums, handing him another pot. “From Natasha—my friend in the guard, you know.” 

“Ahh, the Black Widow,” Bucky teases. Steve has told him a little more about some of his friends—about their unit, about the nicknames they’ve received over the years of skirmishes together. 

Steve chuckles, “Yes, the man-eater herself.” 

“The news is…unsettling,” Steve adds, his voice a little quieter, the laugh fading from it, and at his change of tone Bucky looks up with a frown. 

“You—your old command—they’re in the north again?” Bucky asks, studying Steve, who isn’t meeting his eyes, instead fiddling with the remnants of dirt in the bottom of an emptied clay pot. 

Steve nods. “They’ve been fighting back raids along the border all of the spring—it’s not unusual when the passes clear. But it seems…different this year. It’s late to still be seeing them and…” 

“And?” Bucky prompts him, feeling a little knot of anxiety suddenly tightening in the pit of his stomach. 

Steve looks up now, his face troubled. “And they’ve been pushing deeper into the kingdom than they should be able, almost as if…as if they’ve been granted clear passage through the northern fiefdoms.” 

Bucky swallows, trying to see where Steve is pointing. He’s reminded yet again that this should be something he’s better at by now—this kind of strategic thinking, seeing the whole kingdom as a chessboard and understanding the moves of his opponents and allies. It’s the kind of vision his father has, and he thinks it’s unfair that it passed to Rebecca in such spades and left very little of it for him, when he is meant to be king someday. 

“So you—Natasha thinks that—?” Bucky says, slowly, feeling like he’s nearly there but just can’t connect the final lines. 

Steve’s shoulders heave in a sigh, and he brushes his hands off, looking up at the cloudless blue sky above. 

“She thinks it may not just be trouble with overly aggressive raiders. She thinks they may be receiving help. The northern lands have always been turbulent—but if some of your father’s lords have decided to sow even more trouble…” 

Bucky’s eyes widen with understanding, and he sits heavily down on the soft, churned soil between the newly planted rows. “She thinks it’s trouble _inside_ the kingdom, not from outside making things worse this year, of all years.” 

Steve swallows and nods again, looking uncomfortable. 

“Has she—or Captain Wilson—they’ve shared what they’ve seen—what they suspect?” 

Steve’s mouth twists, and he turns again to fiddle with the rolled cuff of his sleeve pushed up over his forearm. 

“Your father…Commander Phillips…there are many more things demanding urgent attention than just the vague suspicions of a small guard unit.” 

Bucky frowns harder. “But if it’s—if there’s rebellion brewing in the north—surely that merits their attention?” 

Steve shrugs, and dusts of his hands to stand again. “As I said, a rebellion might be one thing if it were proven and outright. At the moment it’s only the whisper of suspected rebellion, and other problems have to push themselves to the fore.” 

“Why—why tell me?” Bucky asks. 

It’s an ill-kept secret for anyone who’s spent any time around the halls of the palace that the prince has no head for politics—something Bucky knows is joked about in good times and muttered with shaken heads by others in bad ones. He’d never known quite how to shake it off, vacillating between jokes of his own about his frivolity and trying his hardest to hide it, to prove them wrong. But he’d be surprised if Steve weren’t aware of it, and he’d always assumed that was at least one reason they’ve rarely discussed anything about the politics of the kingdom at large. That, and the fact that they’re sequestered here away from news that might remind them. 

Steve looks at Bucky measuringly for a moment, and Bucky finds himself a little nervous, waiting for Steve’s assessment. 

“Because I’m worried for them—for my friends,” Steve says at last. “And because I wanted to tell someone, so that I could try to worry less, or less alone at least.” 

Bucky’s throat feels dry, and his voice rasps a little as he asks, “And not…not because I am to be king myself one day, and might need to understand these things?” 

Steve licks his lips, and drops his eyes to the tops of his boots. “No,” he says quietly, “no, I don’t think about that…often. Though I suppose it’s true enough as well.” 

Bucky bites his cheek, thinking about what that means, or means to Steve. 

“I’m sorry—about your friends. About the danger to them. Especially if no one is listening enough to help.” 

Steve shrugs and crouches down again, a little further down the row, poking a finger at the dirt. “It’s always hard to fight something you can’t see. They can push back raiding parties all summer long, but it’s hard to do if they know there is some other unseen enemy yet to draw its sword.” 

Bucky hesitates, suddenly not certain they’re still talking about the same thing. He has a feeling Steve probably doesn’t know either, how much he has maybe muddled the questions and doubts of his friends’ situation and Steve’s own.

Steve seems to realize it, and he shakes his head, smiling ruefully. 

“I wonder what we should start on next, once this bed is done?” Steve asks, looking out over the rest of the garden, and Bucky recognizes a subject change when he hears one. 

Bucky lets him. He understands that there are some things and some times where trying to drag them into the light by talking about them aloud feels too hard, or feels more real than just letting the worry sit quietly in the shadows unacknowledged. 

Still, after they’ve eaten lunch Bucky can tell that Steve’s thoughts are far away. When he stands up from their blanket in the shade of a pear tree, Bucky isn’t surprised when Steve says that he wants to go for a ride into the valley. 

“I haven’t made a patrol in…some time,” he says. Bucky knows he means since they started sharing a bed, and sharing all their other waking hours as well. 

“You go,” Bucky says, stretching his limbs out to lie down flat on the blanket. “I may just take a nap right here—I’m tired enough I’d probably slow you down anyway.” 

Steve looks at him for a long moment, and then nods. “Alright. I won’t be long—two hours, maybe three.” 

Bucky smiles, trying to keep any concern he feels off of his face. He thinks Steve probably needs to be alone with his thoughts today, and Bucky isn’t sure that it would be so bad for him to face his own for a little while either. 

“Take as long as you like, I’ll be here when you get back,” he says, lightly. 

Steve pauses, and then drops down beside Bucky to place a swift kiss on his lips, and then his forehead. Then he turns on his heel and heads in the direction of the stables, and Bucky watches him go, appreciating the strong lean lines of his back and the proud tilt of his golden head where his hair now falls in a shaggy swoop over the neck of his shirt. 

Bucky sighs, flopping back onto the blanket, listening a few minutes later for the pounding sound of hoofbeats tapering off around the back of the house toward the woods. 

He lies for a few moments in the warm dappled light under the tree, letting the summer breeze eddy around him. He’d really had every intention of doing as he said, and falling asleep here in the grass—his muscles are pleasantly cramped from a long morning hunched over the new vegetable garden. But it’s not long before he realizes that his mind is too awake to give in to the lull even of a hot July afternoon. 

Bucky pushes himself up off of the blanket with a groan of annoyance at himself. He wishes it were possible just to turn his thoughts off and on when he wanted—life would be considerably more pleasant if that were an option. 

He folds the blanket over his arm, and makes his way slowly back toward the house, chewing on his lower lip. 

A thought, half-formed, sneaks its way across his mind as he stows the blanket over the back of a chair in their cool, empty living quarters. Bucky wanders to the dining table, pouring a glass of fruit juice from the pitcher left from their breakfast, and he sips at the room temperature liquid pensively as he turns toward the bedroom. 

He feels strange, settling himself at the writing desk beneath the window—strange and out of practice. 

He has to recut the quill in its stand because it’s clotted with dried ink, which is how he knows it’s been too long since he wrote to any of his family, and he feels that spark of guilt again. He knows they must worry for him. He should be better about writing. 

But it’s easier said than done, as always, even with a freshly trimmed quill and an open bottle of ink before him, the blank sheet of parchment taunting him as he hovers over it. 

In the end, he can’t quite bring himself to write about Steve’s concerns to his father, though that was the thought that had occurred to him first in the garden. It seems like the kind of thing he _should_ be able to do—a prince and the heir apparent, to write to his father about his concerns regarding the political endeavors of their northern subjects. Bucky isn’t scared, exactly. His father would probably be thrilled that he’s shown an interest in diplomatic matters. He’s more…embarrassed, maybe. Embarrassed that his father _would_ be so pleased, because it shouldn’t be the kind of thing that would surprise him, and yet Bucky knows it would be a surprise anyway. 

Instead, he addresses the letter to Becca. It’s a half-measure—but not a bad one, all things considered. He begins the letter by telling her about the garden, about the new burst of roses they’ve had, of the yellow ones that remind him of her. 

And then he dips the quill once more into the ink pot, and he scratches out a hasty summary of Steve’s concerns and suspicions about what may or may not be at the root of their troubles in the north. 

Rebecca is not the king— _though maybe she should be_ , says a quick, mutinous voice in his mind that he pushes away as soon as it pipes up—but she has a talent for these things. If _she_ thinks that Steve and his unit’s worries are well-founded, she won’t hesitate to bring it to their father’s attention. She doesn’t have any reason for the hesitation of fear or embarrassment at dipping her toe into kingdom matters, if she thinks it should be raised she will raise it, and no one will question whether her interest is genuine. 

Bucky sighs as he finishes the final lines of explanation, trying not to hedge too much. He loves his sister and she loves him, and she won’t think it odd or silly that he’s asking her about this, even if he feels it. 

_I miss you every day, even if I don’t write anywhere near as often_ , he writes at the bottom of the page. _I wish I could send this with roses from my garden, or that I had any skill as an artist and could replicate them here on the page. I love you—and mother and father—and I hope you are all well. Please know that I am well myself, much more than I could have hoped when we decided I should go away, despite everything._

_But I think of you all often, and am sending you all my love,_

_Bucky_

He shakes the letter quickly, and then seals it up at once, less worried about it smudging than he is about the chance he might change his mind or balk at the last moment. He adds a direction to the palace on the front, with Rebecca’s name, and sets the sealed letter on the table for Matilda to collect. 

Then he takes himself back into the garden, where he won’t be tempted to open it again, to wait for Steve to return. He feels as if there is a war being fought in his chest—pride and the sense that he’s done the right thing, that he’s being who he ought to be and caring about the things that are his birthright in a way he hasn’t found the ability to do before struggling with doubt that maybe after all he’s still somehow a fraud or disappointment. 

Later, when they come back into the house for their supper, the letter is gone, and Bucky gives a small sigh of relief that it’s out of his hands now, one way or another. 

Steve seems to notice as the stiff line of his shoulders slumps a little at the empty space next to the pitcher, and he raises his eyebrows at Bucky in question. 

Bucky avoids his eyes, taking his seat at the table—but it only buys him a moment, because Steve takes his own usual seat across from him, and there isn’t anywhere to escape his gaze. 

Bucky looks up, mouth twisting, at Steve’s open, curious expression. Steve had returned from his ride sweaty and caked with dust, the flanks of his horse streaked with sweat too as evidence that he’d pushed them both hard as he’d grappled with his own internal strife. He’d washed up and changed his clothes for supper, and now his hair curls damply around his temples, pushed back from his high forehead, cheeks pink with scrubbing. 

“I—” Bucky clears his throat, and picks up his fork to push uselessly at some of the dinner Matilda had brought, still steaming on their plates. “I wrote to Rebecca today, while you were out.” 

“Oh?” Steve says, curiosity still evident in his tone. Writing to his sister isn’t exactly an unusual enough event for him to be acting this cagey about, even if it’s not as usual of one as it should be these days. 

Bucky nods down at his plate, stabbing at a spear of asparagus. “I mentioned…your concerns. About the lords in the northern territories.” 

Steve is silent for a moment, and Bucky looks up again, worried. Steve’s face is thoughtful, but not perturbed. 

“I hope that’s alright,” Bucky adds. 

Steve smiles at him, lifting his own fork. “Of course. You should do whatever it is you think best—for the kingdom.” 

“Rebecca is—she’ll know what should be done. Who should be told if—if there’s something to it.” 

Steve nods again, still smiling—but it’s a closed smile, and Bucky isn’t sure what lies underneath it. But, he thinks, maybe it’s just his own self-doubt attributing something to it that isn’t there. 

“Your sister seems smart,” Steve says. 

“She is,” Bucky agrees, unable to keep a note of envy out of his voice. 

“And you’re no fool. She’ll know that whatever you say should be taken seriously.” 

Bucky darts a look at Steve across the table, wondering how it is that Steve can read his mind so easily—is it just because he’s Steve? Or can everyone see plainly whatever Bucky’s concealing, no matter how hard he tries? 

Steve takes a bite of buttery asparagus, and smiles innocently at Bucky as he chews. Bucky smiles wryly back at him, and turns his attention to his own plate with a little more focus now for Matilda’s exceptional cooking. 

“You’re going to be alright, Bucky,” Steve says, after a few moments of silent eating, not looking up from his plate. 

He’s said it so many times since they arrived here together, but Bucky thinks this is the first time it hasn’t been about his curse, and so it lands differently in his chest than it has before. 

He swallows, and lifts another forkful of mashed potatoes. 

“Thank you, Steve.” 

Bucky hopes—and thinks—Steve might know what he means. 

***

It takes Bucky a long time to fall asleep that night, despite the day spent at hard work in the sun. 

His mind is buzzing. He feels cracked open and stretched thin with his thoughts racing, no longer contained by the white garden walls where they’ve lived for the past months. He’s been reminded now of the whole wide world outside of this valley of things to be worried about. 

After the curse, Bucky had told himself that it was all he could do to worry about himself—and that worrying about himself _was_ the only thing he could really do for a kingdom also threatened with darkness. But he remembers now, that the curse isn’t just about him at all. Pierce’s hatred was for all of them, for the entire kingdom—and he’s always known, even if he didn’t let himself dwell on it, that the curse he’d left behind was for all of it too, not just him. 

There’s so much he doesn’t know about how things have been since he was sent here. Some of his reasons were good—some of them weren’t. He was afraid of his responsibilities well before he became a danger to everyone because of magic. 

But he’s connected still to all of it, even here behind these walls. It’s about time he remembered it. 

Unfortunately, the nature of that connectedness is hard to forget when he wakes the next morning, not in his bed. 

Instead, he’s standing in his nightshirt, feet muddy and chest frozen, with Steve’s anxious, fearful face inches from his as he shakes him from the grip of another nightmare. 

As soon as he comes back to himself, whatever it was that had held him once again leaving him for the moment, Bucky slumps into Steve’s arms, already circled around him holding him still through whatever has been happening while his body wasn’t his own. 

A small, wrenches-out sound escapes Steve as he realizes Bucky is awake again, and he smoothes a shaking hand down Bucky’s back over and over. 

They’re in the garden, weak morning light pouring down around them. Bucky tries to wiggle his toes, which feel frozen in the dirt and dew on the ground—then he realizes, it’s not the cold of morning. It’s July, and even the mornings don’t sting like this. 

Bucky looks down around the edge of Steve’s protective grip, and sees that the gras under his feet is cracked and frozen, spreading out away from where he stands. 

Bucky lets out a sob of his own, but forces himself to follow the path of his destruction—dead, blackened ice melting where he must have walked. His eyes land on the little, hopeful bed of seedlings they’d planted just the day before. 

Every single little shoot is curled over and withered as if they’d been buried under a snow bank. Not one green curl remains unscathed, and the sight shatters something in Bucky’s chest that feels very much like his heart, and his knees give way as his eyes flood with tears of remorse. Even if he hadn’t meant to do it, he’d killed them, halting the little life in them in its tracks just by his presence. 

A wild cry of despair escapes him, and Steve makes an answering noise as he catches him so that he doesn’t collapse to the ground. 

“Bucky, Bucky don’t, please, it’s—” 

“ _Don’t_ say it’s okay, Steve, _don’t_ say it’s going to be okay,” Bucky gasps, trying to lean away from Steve’s embrace, pushing against the arms supporting him. He wishes Steve would just let him fall, to lie here among the ruins of their work where he belongs. 

Steve makes a strangled noise, and then he bends, lifting Bucky fully into his arms like a child, and Bucky lets his head fall onto Steve’s shoulder as his tears fall. 

Steve holds him tight, and Bucky squeezes his eyes closed as the sobs continue to pour out of him, ignoring the soft sounds Steve is making, trying vainly to comfort or quiet him. He _won’t_ be comforted or quieted, not now. 

He doesn’t open his eyes even when Steve sets him gently down, though he can feel soft moss underneath him and the morning sun on his face. Bucky curls up around himself, trying to draw away from anything that might be harmed by his poisoned touch. 

Steve strokes his face, softly, and Bucky can feel the heat of Steve’s body bent over him—but he jerks away from it with a gasp. 

“Don’t touch me,” he says, “I can’t touch anything—I can’t—it might—” 

Steve’s hand pulls back from his face and Bucky takes in a shuddering breath of relief, even as he misses the warmth of the contact. It’s safer this way, he thinks—they were all right, sending him away. But it shouldn’t have been with Steve, or Matilda and her family. He should have been sent somewhere nothing else lived, so that he couldn’t hurt anything. He should have been in a stone tower, somewhere cold, so that it didn’t matter how cold he becomes—if his curse is going to freeze everything around him it should have been somewhere it didn’t matter. 

Bucky can still hear Steve’s unsteady breathing, and he wraps his arms even tighter around himself, holding himself separate so that whatever it is inside him won’t spill out again. 

After a few moments Steve rises to his feet and steps softly away, and Bucky’s heart aches again—but it’s better. Steve should leave him alone until there’s no chance that Bucky might harm him. 

But Steve’s footsteps return almost at once, and Bucky feels something soft being pressed into the curl of his palm. It’s not Steve’s hand, and the curiosity is enough for Bucky to crack open his bleary eyes, peering down at it. 

The delicate, pale face of a white orchid looks back at him, petals veined with just the hint of a pink blush at the center. The edges are crisp and fresh, the last drops of morning dew still shining on it. Bucky’s fingers twitch as he spreads his hand open, fearful that at any moment the petals will blacken and curl—but it only shifts on his palm. Shakily, he brushes his thumb across the soft white curve of it. 

Bucky sniffs, a muscle in his cheek jumping, and raises his eyes to Steve. 

“You see? You’re awake now. You’re awake, and you _are_ alright again,” Steve whispers, reaching out with a tentative hand to brush a long lock of Bucky’s hair from his face. This time Bucky doesn’t start away from him. 

“But for how long?” Bucky asks, his throat and raspy with weeping. 

Steve shakes his head, expression sorrowful. “I don’t know. For now—for today.” 

Bucky swallows thickly, closing his eyes again, and curls his fingers around the orchid, wanting to feel it in his palm but careful not to crush the delicate bloom. He clenches his jaw and shakes his head. 

Steve takes a deep breath, and then he stands again, and Bucky watches him go, dully. His mind is sluggish, like it too has been encased in ice and is only starting to thaw, even while his blood is rushing through his veins at twice its usual rate. 

When Steve returns, it’s with his arms full of more flowers—bright blue Larkspur, cheerful dahlias with their heavy heads nodding on their stems, lacy sprays of daisies, and fragrant pink amaryllis that smells like far off places. 

He kneels again beside Bucky, this time without speaking as he heaps the blooms around Bucky’s face, his hands, threading them into his hair, tucking them softly against his neck and pressing them into his hands. Soon all Bucky can see and smell are the flowers, vibrant and overwhelming and somehow warmer even than the sun falling across him in the little mossy clearing where Steve had laid him. 

Bucky feels his eyes begin to leak again, but this time the tears aren’t of fear, but gratitude. 

“Steve,” he whispers, knowing Steve will hear him even if the word is barely more than a breath. 

“All of this grew because you touched it, Bucky,” Steve says, voice pitched low. He slides one of his hands lightly into Bucky’s twining both of their fingers together around the long stalk of a brilliantly purple iris. “You made all of this happen, too. That’s the part that’s really you. You remember, don’t you?” 

Bucky tries to nod, but can’t quite follow through with the gesture, eyes screwing up tight against the pain of it. He wants to believe that’s true—he wants to _feel_ that it’s true. 

Steve sits beside him silently for a long time like that. Bucky doesn’t know exactly how much time passes—until the sun climbs high and hot enough overhead that his nightshirt begins to stick between his shoulders, and he feels a prickle of sweat at his temples. 

At last, Bucky sits up, moving gingerly as the flowers fall away from him. 

Wordlessly, they gather as many of them as they can that haven’t yet wilted in the sun, and side by side carry them into the house. 

***

Bucky is listless in the days following that. In the past, once the dream was gone, he’d felt like the space it left in him was filled almost immediately with himself again. But this time, he continues feeling hollowed out for a long time after it’s receded—a reminder of the space inside himself that something else has made a home in, even when it seems to be in hiding. 

He can feel Steve’s concerned eyes on him almost constantly, any time that he thinks Bucky isn’t looking. Bucky wishes for Steve’s sake that he could muster up the energy to be alright—but even for Steve he can’t bring himself to act it. 

Steve does everything he can to soothe him. He coaxes Bucky from bed each morning as soon as the sun is bright enough, setting him up in the garden, bringing him fruit from their trees and reading aloud when Bucky can’t seem to stir himself even to walk along the bright, cheerful paths. 

It hurts Bucky that he can’t even bring himself to work in the garden beds. This curse has stolen so much from him, and it seems cruel that it has now taken the joy from the one thing he’s counted on these months. But he can’t forget what his hands had done to the green things there when he was asleep. 

He knows Steve is coddling him, too, which is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, Bucky is scared and sad, and Steve’s constancy brings him the same sort of safe feeling of relief he has each morning when the sun rises. Like no matter what else happens, at least he can count on _this_. But he also feels guilty accepting it—it makes sense that they should all be afraid, and afraid of _him_. He shouldn’t be the one being comforted. 

Bucky realizes just how much Steve is trying to shield him one afternoon a few days after the nightmare, as Bucky’s slumped lethargically against the trunk of a nectarine tree, aimlessly watching the path of a fat golden bumble bee as it hops its way between sweet pea blossoms. 

Steve had gotten up to fetch a new book from inside the house, but when it occurs to Bucky that he’s been gone longer than that errand would require, he raises his head in faint concern to look for him. 

Eventually he sees Steve returning, book in hand—but not from inside the white stucco house. Instead he makes his way slowly from around the back kitchen entrance, his head hanging low as he chews at the corner of his thumb nail, looking deep in thought. 

As soon as he looks up and sees Bucky watching him, his pensive expression evaporates, and he pastes a reassuring smile on his face. 

“What happened?” Bucky asks, as soon as Steve sinks down beside him on the blanket. 

Steve doesn’t meet his eyes, taking more time than is strictly necessary to settle himself with the book on his lap. There’s a pink blush spreading up the back of his neck though, so Bucky doesn’t let himself be diverted when Steve asks, nonchalantly, 

“What do you mean?” 

“Steve. What happened?” Bucky repeats, more firmly. 

Steve does meet his eyes now, his mouth twisting in a grimace. 

“It’s nothing. I mean I took care of it.” 

“It being…?” 

Steve sighs and shakes his head. “There was a little trouble with our supply delivery—Thomas’ friend usually brings fresh grain and things for the kitchen up from the village once a week.” 

“And he—didn’t come?” Bucky asks, worried, though he isn’t sure yet where the worry should be focusing itself. 

“No he did,” Steve says, bowing his head again over the book. “He just—he warned Matilda that grain stores are beginning to run low. The price has gone up everywhere. There isn’t a problem there, your parents are supplying whatever coin we need. But it just means—” 

“It means people might go hungry this winter, who don’t have the coin,” Bucky supplies, dully. He feels his heart echoing in the empty hollow of his chest. 

Steve nods, looking somber. “Maybe. If the harvest this year isn’t a good one. But the season has been mild—there’s plenty of hope of it.” 

“Mmm,” Bucky says, looking away. 

“Your father is a wise man, Bucky,” Steve says, quietly, taking Bucky’s hand and pressing it between his own. “He’s already seeing that stores in the royal palace are being rationed to supply towns that are in danger of running out. There’s nothing we can do here that isn’t being done already.” 

“There’s nothing we can do,” Bucky repeats, meaning something entirely different from how Steve had said those words. 

Steve frowns, wrapping Bucky’s fingers tighter, and shaking them a little less gently, so that Bucky looks up and meets his eyes. 

“But we’ll do what we can—whatever it takes, right?” Steve says. 

Bucky nods, and squeezes Steve’s hand in return, faintly. 

“Bucky, please” Steve whispers, “I want to help you. I know I can’t feel what you must be feeling but please—don’t shut me out now.” 

There’s a slight crack to his voice as he asks it that breaks Bucky’s heart a little, enough for a well of emotion to bubble up into the dull buzzing emptiness to fill it, shaking him awake for the first time in several days. 

“Steve,” Bucky says, reaching for Steve’s hands with both of his now, and pulling them to his face to kiss them. “You do help. You do. More than you know.” 

Steve chews the inside of his cheek, nodding jerkily as he watches Bucky’s face, and Bucky can see that his eyes are overly bright around the edges. 

Bucky feels humbled by the tenderness in Steve’s expression, overwhelmed to be the object of it. _He’s so good_. Suddenly Bucky just wants to bring back a real smile to Steve’s face, to brush away the tense lines around his eyes that Bucky knows are all from worry over _him_. To show Steve how much good he brings just by being here, that he doesn’t need to try to understand anything more than that. 

“Come inside with me,” Bucky says, gently pulling on Steve’s hands as he moves to rise. “It’s getting hot out here in the sun.” 

Steve takes in a long, unsteady breath as if collecting himself, and lets Bucky pull him up to stand too. 

“Alright,” he agrees, simply. 

It’s cooler inside, dim and shaded from the summer sun by the trees surrounding the house. They’ve already eaten their lunch, early and out of doors, and their evening meal is still several hours away, so the house is hushed in the sleepy warm hours of the afternoon. 

Bucky holds Steve’s hand clasped loosely in his, but Steve follows his lightest touch as he steps softly through the silent living chamber toward the bedroom door. 

There’s a bowl of geraniums and marigolds on the window sill, the subtle, spicy scent of them in the sun filling the still air of the room as Bucky closes the door behind them. Steve turns to him, but Bucky keeps walking, so Steve doesn’t break his stride either, letting Bucky walk him backward until his knees hit the edge of their big white bed. 

They pause at the edge of it, standing a little apart from each other, and Bucky feels himself swaying slightly on his feet toward Steve, as if the very slight breeze through the window is moving him like a flower on a long stem. 

Steve just looks back at him steadily, his expression even as Bucky searches his face for a long moment. Then Bucky reaches out, and lets his fingertips, just barely touching, travel a trail down Steve’s throat, tracing the lines of his ribs, and Steve’s eyes drift half-shut with a sigh. 

Bucky tugs softly on the hem of Steve’s shirt, freeing it from the waistband of his breeches, and eases it up over his head, which Steve lifts his arms to allow—both of them moving slowly, as if a sudden movement or a word might shatter the moment. He unbuttons Steve’s breeches, and Steve steps lightly out of his boots and lets them fall to the floor with equal care, so that he’s standing in front of Bucky barefooted and shirtless, in just his underthings. 

Bucky lets his eyes rove over Steve’s strong body, the curve of his shoulders and pectorals and flat lines of his collarbones and stomach, until Steve makes a slight gesture with one hand to reach for him, betraying the first sign of anything more insistent, and Bucky shucks his own shirt and pants to the floor beside Steve’s. He steps out of them and places the flat of his palm against Steve’s chest, pressing him backward until he’s stretched out on the bed, and Bucky can climb up after him. 

Bucky gazes down at Steve lying underneath him for another moment, drinking him in hungrily, memorizing how it feels in this moment to have him here, pliant and willing to follow wherever Bucky leads him. He wants to memorize it, as if he might recite this moment to himself later, like a poem or a song without words.

Bucky bends his head and begins, begins the slow, careful work of mapping Steve’s body with his lips—he counts his ribs with kisses, brushes his mouth first down one lean arm to the pale skin of his wrist, and then the other, kneads the heel of his hand into the deceptively tensed muscles in Steve’s thighs and calves, and wraps his fingers briefly around an ankle, smoothing a palm over the arch of his foot and back up. And Steve shifts ever so slightly, sighing as his body relaxes and opens under Bucky’s touch. Finally, Bucky moves upward again, stretching himself out to cover Steve, at last seeking out Steve’s lips with his. 

They’re neither of them fully aroused yet, but both of their bodies are hot, skin flushing with desire and the heat of the summer afternoon, and Bucky can feel Steve beginning to harden against him as he presses them together—chests, hips, legs twining. Steve’s eyes are fully closed now, and Bucky kisses him gently at first, and then more deeply—not all at once, but little by little, like the tide climbing further and further up onto the shore. 

After several long minutes that seem to melt and stretch like tree sap in the sun, Bucky draws away from Steve’s mouth, turning his head to nuzzle at the soft place behind the hinge of his jaw below his ear, and Steve lets out a small, panting breath. At other times it would be the least of the kind of noises Bucky might try to pull from Steve in a moment like this—but right now, in the careful spell of quiet they’ve woven, that small, involuntary breath goes ringing through him like a shout, and Bucky takes in a sharp inhale of his own. 

That seems to allow Steve to move at last, and he brings his hands up to splay across Bucky’s back, pulling him closer with slow, deliberate strength. Bucky kisses him again, deeper this time, breathing into it as he tastes the desire on Steve’s tongue, and their chests slide against each other as they move a little more—nothing like a rhythm yet between them, but seeming to search for all the ways that they can find more places for their skin to touch, and Bucky brings both hands up to hold Steve’s face tight between them. 

Steve is hard by the time Bucky finally rocks his hips against him with intention, and Steve once again lets out a punched out sound that sets Bucky’s already heated skin on fire, yet somehow also ripples goosebumps up the back of his neck, too. Bucky pulls away to look at Steve’s face as he does it again, grinding against him, and Steve’s eyes flutter open, his pupils dark and the lids heavy as he just gazes back, open-mouthed. 

Now Bucky can’t help but let out a real sound this time, a soft groan that nonetheless falls deafeningly between them, and Steve shudders under him. 

“Steve,” Bucky whispers, dropping his head to breathe the words against Steve’s parted lips, “you want me?” 

Steve’s breath is hot as he exhales. “Always,” he whispers. 

Bucky finally releases his grip on Steve’s face, reaching behind him to cover Steve’s hands at his back, gripping his wrists and pushing them downward, dipping into the curve of his lower back, over the swell of his ass as he spreads his knees just a little to make his intentions clear, and lower still until Steve’s eyes widen a fraction in understanding, focusing on his face. 

“Are you sure?” Steve asks, still just above a whisper. 

Bucky nods, and lets go of Steve’s wrist, leaving his hands to do as they will as he reaches for the waistband of Steve’s underclothes, the last thin layer of barrier between them. 

There’s a little more of a scuffle of motion then than there has been up until now, as Bucky has to scramble up for them both to kick away the last of their clothes. He uses the ungraceful moment to reach over to the drawer in the little table beside the bed, too, where he’d stashed a small jar he’d stolen from the pantry several days ago. He hadn’t exactly had what you’d call a plan for it then—but this isn’t the first time he’s thought about this either, something Steve seems to realize when he sees it, eyes darkening as he pulls Bucky back on top of him with a low moan of anticipation. 

The oil Bucky had found smells faintly of lavender, and Steve’s fingers slip over his skin as he tries to grip Bucky’s hips to steady both of them. 

Bucky kisses him again as Steve first presses his fingers into him, their hips rocking against one another now in a purposeful motion. He doesn’t stop kissing him as Steve’s fingers grow more sure and confident, and Bucky’s pulse races as his gut pools with fire and desperate, overwhelming want. 

Steve’s chest is heaving when Bucky sits back and straddles him, and Bucky plants one hand over Steve’s sternum to ground himself. 

Steve says his name— _Bucky_ —drawn out and broken in the middle as Bucky takes him in, sinking down until their bodies are joined completely. 

Things move faster after that—after a few breaths in which they remain still, adjusting to the feeling—the dam holding back their urgency and desire breaking at the same moment, their hands grasping wildly at one another, and Bucky flings his head back with an unchecked moan as Steve’s fingers scramble for purchase to grip his hips as he thrusts up into him. 

It doesn’t take long like that—soon the muscles in Steve’s stomach are jumping and quivering under Bucky’s fingers, and Bucky rises a little on his knees as Steve gets his feet flat on the bed. 

“Buck—I’m close—” Steve pants, his head tipping back onto the pillow, the long line of his smooth throat laid bare, too tempting for Bucky not to place his palm against it, his thumb dipping into the hollow of Steve’s throat, and Bucky just nods frantically in agreement. 

Steve comes first, with a cut-off groan deep in his throat as all his muscles go briefly still and taut. But his hand works fast along Bucky’s length, and even when the rhythm falters it’s enough—Steve’s fingers wrapped around him and Steve’s mouth dropping and the driving heat of Steve inside him are enough—to tip Bucky quickly over the edge after him. 

Bucky’s arms are trembling as he comes down from the high of it, and Steve’s body has gone slack too as Bucky rolls off of him and collapses to his side with a sigh of momentary, blissful contentment. 

His eyes are closed, cheek smushed into the pillow like he’ll never move again, but he feels Steve twist and rustle beside him, and then Steve quickly wipes away some of the mess with what feels like his discarded shirt. But then he’s back, fumbling with the sheet to pull it over them as he slips in again beside Bucky. Bucky rolls onto his side, and Steve scoots in to curl around him, chest pressed to his back and knees crooked in to slot against him like a puzzle piece. 

Steve’s arm wraps around Bucky’s waist, and he nuzzles for a few moments in Bucky’s sweaty, tousled hair, his breath slowly evening out again. 

Bucky doesn’t want to move—and for right now, at least, it’s an option. So he burrows a little deeper into Steve’s arms, settling his head more comfortably on the pillow, and keeps his eyes shut as he focuses his senses on Steve’s heart thudding between his shoulder blades.

He’s not quite asleep, though he’s floating toward it, when Steve shifts again, raising his head and brushing a strand of Bucky’s hair back behind his ear. He leans in, and Bucky can feel his breath ghosting across the shell of it, pleasantly warm. 

Then Steve whispers, “I love you, Bucky.” 

Bucky tries not to go still or give away his surprise. He’s not sure if Steve thinks he’s already asleep—and in the little burst of panic that sparks through him, he decides to pretend that he is, so that he doesn’t have to answer. 

He wouldn’t know what to say. 

Steve loves him. 

Did he know it? He’s not sure. Bucky has loved Steve for a long time now—but then, that makes sense. It seems impossible that anyone could spend any time with Steve without loving him. 

After a moment, Steve sighs quietly, and settles himself back down onto the pillow, arm tightening around Bucky’s waist, a solid, comforting pressure. 

Bucky lies motionless in his arms, wishing he were braver. 

He _should_ roll over, take Steve’s face in his hands again and say _you can’t love me_. Or maybe, _you can love me like this, but not always, not all of it_. Steve should understand that it’s not that Bucky doesn’t _want_ it to be true—it’s just that it can’t be. Maybe Steve still hasn’t really understood that one day—eventually—soon—the darkness that lives inside of Bucky isn’t going to be satisfied creeping out only in his nightmares. And that part of him is something that can’t share any kind of space with something as bright and golden as Steve’s love. 

But he doesn’t. 

Eventually he keeps his eyes closed long enough that his feigned sleep turns into a real one, and he sinks into uneasy but blessedly dreamless unconsciousness.

***


	8. Midsummer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's Midsummer, when the kingdom celebrates the coming harvest, and Steve and Bucky join in the celebrations that connect them all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello tuesday...between [broad gesture] everything in the world and ao3 emails not working the past couple of weeks, it seems that time has well and truly evaporated as a concept. 
> 
> STILL we really hope that if you found this chapter update against those odds that you enjoy it! final chapter coming next week :)

Across the scrubbed kitchen counter, Bucky glances up and meets Steve’s eyes, his fingers pausing their work on the little bundle of herbs in front of him as he smiles back. 

Steve ducks his head, still a little flustered to be allowed to be caught looking. 

Bucky’s smile widens, and he leans across the table to cup Steve’s cheek in his hand, briefly, and Steve can’t help but turn his face into the touch to drop a kiss on Bucky’s palm. 

Bucky’s eyes flash with something, quickly hidden, before he takes his hand back and turns his attention again to the strewn leaves and bundles in front of them. 

This week is Midsummer, the day when the sun is king and stays in sight of his lands for the longest hours of the year. 

It’s always been tradition that on the summer solstice, the entire kingdom takes a day of rest from the fields, where all of the grain crops that will sustain them through the year are beginning to grow tall and strong in the fields, pointing toward September and harvest time. Midsummer is hopeful celebration—different from the kinds of harvest parties they’ll throw when they know how it’s all going to turn out—it’s meant to bring good luck for strong crops in days to come. Across the kingdom, people will light bonfires and prepare feasts, as a sort of charm to show confidence that the year ahead will be a good one. 

This year the preparations for celebrating feel particularly deliberate, the optimism taking on a kind of bravado. The truth is it _needs_ to be a good year for the harvest, when the last was weak and stores are running low. 

All of the traditions that go along with the feasting and parties are ones that have echoes of the old kinds of magic, things that feel as if they once were spells, even if they don’t really carry that kind of true power any more. Steve thinks maybe this year everyone is pouring a little more intention into the process, as if they can wield that magic again as more than just a symbol. 

He’s spent the past few days helping cut dead branches from the fruit trees, assembling a pile that will become his and Bucky’s bonfire for their own small celebration. 

Currently, the mess in front of them is comprised of haphazard stacks of herbs from the garden that he and Bucky are assembling into the little bundles which they’ll cast onto the fire, as the tradition goes. 

Each one has special meaning, though Steve thinks mostly the reason anyone still does this part is because the burning herbs smell good when they’re tossed onto the fire—that and the fact that it’s most children’s favorite thing at the Midsummer feasts, that they get to burn things. 

Still, he and Bucky had cheerfully collected and assembled all the usual ones, and are spending the heat of the afternoon tying them into bundles together in the slightly cooler shelter of the kitchen—vervain for good fortune, lovage for strength, oregano for joy, sage for wisdom, rosemary for remembering those who have passed before, calendula and yarrow for health and healing. Already the kitchen is filled with the sharp, green scent of the cut stalks, as they twine them about with string, ready to lay them out to dry a little in the next couple of days. 

Bucky’s fingertips are stained with green from working with them, and he has a sprig of purple hyssop tucked behind his ear, tangled in his hair. 

It makes Steve feel extremely fond, and he suddenly has a vision of Bucky meeting his mother—Sarah walking with them in Bucky’s garden, admiring Bucky’s efforts and sharing some of her secrets from a lifetime of tending to her own, both of them stained with green and dirt under their fingernails and speaking the language of flowers to one another. 

Steve is staring again. Bucky glances up once more from where he’s weaving a long stem of rosemary around a handful of round, orange rose hips, his mouth quirking up at the corner. 

Bucky sets down the bundle, his eyes sparkling with mirth, and reaches for a different cutting on the table. He stretches across the space between them again, and tucks the stem of it into one of the buttonholes at Steve’s open collar, so that the scent of it rises to fill his nose above the rest, and he looks down—lavender. 

His cheeks flame at once at the sudden image that scent now conjures for him, and Bucky chuckles softly in his throat, knowingly. 

“You’re distracted today,” Bucky says, in a low, teasing voice. 

“Um,” Steve says, intelligently. 

It’s not quite fair—he _is_ distracted, but he hadn’t been thinking of _that_ …at least, he wasn’t before. Not that he hasn’t spent many many distracted moments over the last several days reliving that particular lavender-scented memory, the heat of Bucky’s body over his, Bucky’s body opening for his, Bucky—

“Uh-huh,” Bucky says, with a bit of a smirk. 

Steve huffs at him, aggrieved. 

“I _wasn’t_ ,” Steve says, with as much dignity as he can muster, reaching for a few more leaves to tuck into the edges of the tightly wound bundle in front of him. “I was thinking my mother always did angelica, for inspiration in the coming year. But I don’t think we’ve grown any—too warm down here.” 

“Oh, well,” Bucky says, still looking a little sly, “we’ll have to get our inspiration elsewhere I suppose.” 

“Mmm,” Steve hums, tipping his head to sniff again surreptitiously at the sprig of lavender at his throat. 

Bucky, of course, catches him at it immediately, and gives him an absurd, lusty wink. 

It startles a bark of laughter out of Steve, and Bucky’s over-the-top expression melts away into a real, answering grin, crinkling around the corners of his eyes. 

It makes Steve feel almost unbearably light, having Bucky flirt with him like that—seeing him laughing and silly like there’s nothing else for them to do but this. It feels so natural, and so all-consuming at some moments, to be wrapped up in thinking about nothing but Bucky’s smiles, how to make him laugh, the way Bucky looks at him sometimes like he’d like to get him into bed—as if he has to flirt or be coy to make that happen. 

But in reality, these moments have been rather few and farther between this past week, despite what had happened between them that afternoon. 

Bucky’s nightmares have been unceasing since the night he’d sleepwalked again—the longest string of unbroken bad nights he’s had since they’d arrived, leaving little room for the kind of easy, unburdened affection that they might have enjoyed if this were any other time or place. Steve can only imagine that if things were normal he would have had a hard time letting Bucky out of his sight or keeping his hands off him, maybe even in letting him leave their bed for days after that. It seems selfish to think of that, when obviously what Bucky is experiencing has much more important worries surrounding it—but Steve can’t help being sorry over it, on what they might have if they were free to, just a little. 

Still, it makes Steve appreciate the precious minutes where it all fades, when the tense lines around Bucky’s eyes and mouth disappear for a moment or two like this. 

He realizes that he hasn’t been paying attention to whatever part of his thoughts might be crossing his face, and when he looks up again he finds Bucky’s eyes on him, his expression thoughtful, too. But he brightens again almost at once. 

“I’m going to make us both a wreath to wear for our little party,” Bucky says, cheerfully. He purses his lips and tips his head theatrically studying Steve for a moment. “Yours should be oak, I think, for strength. And Larkspur for laughter and affection—plus it will make your eyes even bluer than they are already.” 

Steve’s mouth tips up at the corner. “And yours should be fennel for flattery, and buttercups for charm.” 

Bucky laughs again. “Charm I will allow, only for you—but it isn’t flattery to tell the truth. Maybe instead I ought to try poppies, and hope for better sleep.” He considers Steve for another moment and grins. “Or dahlias, for my very good taste.” 

“I think our dahlias are done for the season,” Steve replies. “But that would make quite a crown. So you’re to be our Midsummer king then, for our feast?” 

In villages all over the kingdom, a Midsummer king and queen are always chosen from among the young people. Steve can well imagine Bucky presiding over what must generally be a rather raucous celebration in the royal city, dressed in his most colorfully embroidered clothes, shining hair braided up around a crown of flowers in addition to his true royal circlet of gold. 

But Bucky shakes his head, and looks away, interrupting Steve’s imaginings. 

“No,” he says, quietly, “no, I’ve never much wanted to be king.” 

His tone is light, but Steve knows that the words themselves are heavy—and that Bucky is actually admitting to something that he has perhaps never allowed himself to say out loud before. They’ve never talked directly about it, about Bucky’s fears and reluctance about the fact that he will one day inherit the throne. But Steve knows it troubles him, that he feels unworthy of it. Steve thinks Bucky is too hard on himself—he’s kind and good. He’ll make a good king. But he feels sorry to see how heavily the doubt sits on Bucky anyway, on top of everything else. 

“It seems silly to think of needing a king or queen to preside over a feast that’s just the two of us, anyhow,” Steve says, letting Bucky off the hook for having to answer seriously. “We’ll have no masters instead.” 

They’d invited Matilda and Thomas (and Agnes through them) to all celebrate together, but had been turned down rather flatly. Steve supposes there wouldn’t be much fun in it for them to eat with him and Bucky, not if they felt like they had to keep to good behavior the whole time—Midsummer is a night for bad behavior, so he doesn’t begrudge them having their feasting to themselves. 

Steve reaches across the table and squeezes Bucky’s hand, and Bucky squeezes back. 

“I’ll put a little lavender in yours too,” Bucky says, low, “in case it ever occurs to you to stop looking at me the way you are just at this moment, and you need to be reminded.” 

Steve laughs, wryly, brushing the flower in his shirt again with his fingertips. “No. I won’t need to be reminded. But I won’t protest, either.” 

Bucky smiles, looking a little flustered and pleased, and busies himself again with the last of the loose herbs in front of him, scraping them up to tie into a bunch, and Steve watches him for a few more moments from under his lashes. 

He loves him so much it aches sometimes, like it doesn’t all fit inside of him, and his ribs are groaning under the pressure. 

Steve hasn’t said it again aloud. He’s not sure if it would be welcome, or if he should—not sure what Bucky might have said if Steve hadn’t waited until he was asleep to whisper it in his ear, the words finally too much to keep inside in that moment. Or worse, the nagging possibility that he’s tried not to think about that Bucky _hadn’t_ been asleep at all, and that the silence _had_ been his answer. 

It doesn’t change anything if it had, Steve thinks, with just a hint of self-pity. He’s too stupid for Bucky for what’s true to change just because it isn’t returned. 

Soon Bucky finishes the last of their bundles, and Steve puts his thoughts aside for the time being to help him carry them out to set in the sun to dry. 

***

Midsummer’s Day dawns clear and hot and brittle, the sky so searingly bright the blue appears almost white overhead. 

Steve and Bucky watch the sun’s arrival over the tops of the fruit trees from the stone bench among the roses, as avidly as if they were watching a foot race, waiting for the victor to cross the finish line. 

They’d descended into the garden in the steely grey of pre-dawn, Bucky’s nightmares driving them out of the house early in their viciousness. 

Steve feels Bucky slump under the arm he has wrapped around his shoulders as the first rays of sunshine crest the wall and fall across them, and he squeezes Bucky’s shoulders reassuringly. 

“I can be glad of one thing today, at least,” Bucky says, leaning into Steve’s chest, heavy with exhaustion. 

“What’s that?” Steve asks, quietly. They haven’t spoken much yet, and he could feel how Bucky had been holding himself tight and tense as he’d waited for the reprieve and relative safety of daylight. But he seems to be letting himself relax a little now that it’s here. 

Bucky tilts his face up to the sunshine. “It’s going to be a very long day.” 

Steve hums his agreement, raising his hand to shield his eyes from the light as he peers across the garden. 

“I wish they all could be, for your sake,” he says. 

“Well,” Bucky replies, shaking himself as he sits up straighter. “Let’s make this a good one, shall we?” 

The warm morning eventually gives way to a swelteringly hot day. But it seems to Steve that Bucky needs the reassurance of the sun overhead, and so they stay outside despite the sweat that prickles at their temples and makes their shirts cling between their shoulders. Even the restless, ever-present breeze does little to cool them down, so dry it feels like it’s pulling the moisture from their skin. 

Steve spends some of it building and rebuilding the stack of wood for their bonfire, making sure the branches are piled together tightly, and slipping ever smaller bits of kindling in between them so that when they light it later it will blaze up strong and fast. 

Bucky wanders around him through the flower beds, collecting blooms for the promised wreaths. When his arms are full of colorful stems he takes himself to the shade under the heavy, fruit-laden branches of a peach tree, folding his legs up under him and setting to work with deft fingers to weave them into circlets. 

They’d demanded Matilda take the day to herself for the celebration, and so Steve tackles the task of making sure they’re fed. Still, she’d apparently not trusted him when he said he could manage for a day, because she’d spent the previous one baking heaps of delicious things to tide them over. Between Matilda’s mince pies and handfuls of berries they pick themselves, warm from the sun and straight off of the vine, they eat like kings. 

Bucky finishes their crowns, and kneels in front of Steve to settle it on his head. He grins down at Steve as he fusses with it, making sure it’s secure, running his fingertips maybe more than is strictly necessary through Steve’s hair to fit it. True to his word, there are oak leaves and larkspur in the chain, woven with blood red asters—and just a handful of fragrant lavender. 

Bucky sits back on his haunches, and lifts his own crown to his head, settling it over the shining waves of his hair. 

“How do I look?” Bucky asks, posing. 

Steve’s lips quirk into a half-smile, and he pretends to study Bucky thoughtfully. Bucky had made his own crown with the threatened poppies, pink and yellow and red, but also with a spray of white freesia, which stands out in lovely, stark contrast to the darkness of his curls. 

“Very well,” Steve says, decisively. “It’s just the sort of crown that suits you.” 

Bucky smiles, and ducks his head, pleased. “And you,” he says. 

The day passes slowly, and peacefully. It’s not so very different from many others they’ve spent here in the garden, under the shade of the trees—occasionally sketching out more plans for improvement, things to build when the weather cools, and plants to set in before fall takes hold. 

But it feels different, knowing that today it’s not just them whiling away the hot summer hours in this fashion—that they’re being joined by people all across the kingdom, not so alone under the fruit trees, but sharing the afternoon with families and farmers and soldiers and the royal family even in picnics and preparations for the night’s festivities. For today, they’re connected with the world beyond the barred white walls of the garden, in spirit at least. 

It’s a long, lingering day, in mood as well as the length of hours the sun takes to make its unhurried arc across the sky. 

They read a little, and they talk, and lounge. They consider making the trek to their swimming pool in the woods, but ultimately can’t quite be bothered to stir from the lazy sprawl they’ve fallen into on the grass in the orchard. 

At last, the harsh glare of afternoon begins to soften and melt—the light like butter in a pan, sliding smoothly around them. 

Even the sunset seems drawn out, the sun clinging as long as it can to the edges of the sky like it’s reminding them whose day it is, like it doesn’t want to let go. 

It floods the garden with dim golden and rose colored light, staining the white walls pink around them. 

Bucky straightens Steve’s crown of flowers, his mouth tilted up at one corner. 

“About time to light your bonfire, isn’t it? The sun’s almost down,” he says. 

Steve nods, and runs his fingers once through the long strands of Bucky’s hair, where it falls over his shoulder in a wave. 

It only takes one match and a matter of moments kneeling at the edge of the stacked branches for the flames to crackle to life, running immediately across the dried leaves Steve had set at the base, igniting the smaller pieces of kindling, then taking hold of the larger branches. 

Steve steps back from it, watching as the flame curls toward the top of it with satisfaction. 

Bucky laughs, poking him in the arm. 

“Yes yes, you did a very nice job,” he says, teasingly. 

Steve turns to him, beaming. 

“Didn’t I? This is a good fire, Buck.” 

Bucky scrunches his nose, laughing at him, and tips his head up to drop a quick kiss on Steve’s mouth. 

They watch the fire for a few more moments, blazing brighter and brighter as the pink sunset begins to sink into purple twilight. 

“Look,” Bucky says after a while, pointing toward the wall at the far end of the garden, where they can see the hills in the distance. 

Steve looks, and catches the small flicker that Bucky is pointing at. There are a few dots of light taking life across them—other Midsummer bonfires and feasts beginning in the rest of the kingdom. 

There’s a whoop and a shriek of laughter from nearer by—echoing up from the woods on the other side of the house where Matilda and Thomas and Agnes must be beginning their own celebration. It’s hard to square the riotous, mirthful sound with the usually composed Matilda, and Steve and Bucky look at each other quickly, their faces breaking out in mirrored grins. 

The fire is going strong now, consuming the entirety of the pile, nearly as tall as them, and Steve steps back away from the heat of it, wiping his forehead. 

“I guess this means it’s time to feast again,” Bucky says, cheerfully, looping his arm in Steve’s as they step further from the circle of heat. 

“I’ll go to the kitchen and start bringing it out,” Steve says. 

“No, wait a moment,” Bucky replies, looking around over his shoulder. “This is all to bring a good harvest right? Seems only fitting to begin with our own.” 

“Alright,” Steve replies, gamely. 

He feels loose and warm, a little sun-weary from spending the day in the heat. Around them, the garden has gone very still, and Steve frowns slightly, realizing that the breeze which had been rambling around them all day has vanished, leaving the crackling blaze of the fire the only sound apart from their own. 

Steve blinks sluggishly as Bucky steps away, watching him reach up into the low branches of the peach tree. 

He feels a niggling sensation—like something he’s forgotten to do, but can’t quite put his finger on. He shakes his head, trying to clear his thoughts…maybe it’s smoke from the fire, getting in his eyes and making him feel a little lightheaded…

Bucky turns from the tree, a round, ripe peach in his hand and a smile on his face, and he steps back toward Steve, holding it out. 

“Here, you should have the first bite—” he begins to say. 

Bucky stops, mouth dropping open in confusion, and both of their eyes are drawn like magnets to the fruit in his hand—and everything around them stops, dead silence swallowing everything. 

The soft orange and pink skin of the peach is darkening, beginning at the bottom and spreading through it like veins until the entire thing is black and withered on Bucky’s palm. 

Steve takes in a sharp breath, head finally clearing with horrible recognition, and his eyes fly to Bucky’s face. 

Bucky’s gaze locks with his for a moment—just one—the horror and despair clear for a brief flash before his eyes go black. 

Steve stumbles half a step forward, toward Bucky, but Bucky raises his other hand, halting him in his tracks. 

“Don’t,” he rasps. And Steve isn’t sure if it’s magic or simply the shock of hearing Bucky’s voice sound like it’s full of broken glass that locks his feet into place, watching helplessly as a new wind that Steve can’t feel whips at Bucky’s hair. 

The blackness of his eyes seems to pool and spread, Bucky’s skin losing its color and shining grayly in the half-light of dusk. Dark veins spread and stand out at his temples, in his throat, and the bright crown of flowers on his head withers and blackens too, dead blooms falling in a shower around him. 

Steve shudders, and now he _can_ feel whatever it is that’s swirling around Bucky, ice cold air pouring off of him in waves that Steve thinks he can actually _see_ , like frozen blue fog rising around his feet. 

There’s a blast of it, and Bucky’s body convulses, a trickle of dark liquid appearing at the corner of his lips as his mouth goes slack—but Steve is distracted from the sight by a flash to his right, and he rips his gaze from Bucky’s terrible face to their bonfire, where the golden flames have suddenly flared blue. The branches in the center of it are black, silhouetted against the flame, and now Steve can see that the ground has gone the same color—a flood of darkness oozing from beneath Bucky’s bare feet in the grass which is no longer grass. 

A fluttering in his periphery makes Steve jerk, a feeling like insect wings around his face and shoulders—but it’s just his own flower crown, the charred flowers falling lifeless to the ground. 

The blackened peach drops from Bucky’s hand, rolling away from him and leaving a trail of death behind it, evil magic rippling out from its path with grasping, creeping tendrils. 

Steve spins, tracking the spread of it, as it races out from Bucky across the garden, and now there is more of the same blue, icy fire—it leaps from their bonfire onto the roses, and ignites the peach tree behind Bucky, and on the hills beyond Steve watches in horror as the cheery little lights of distant bonfires flicker—and then flare blue against the void of what was once green land around them, blotting out everything it touches. 

The darkness that has threatened Bucky for these last months, his curse, has finally made its purpose known. 

Steve doesn’t have to keep his eyes on the hills, or look down into their little valley, to know that it’s racing over the land, seeping far and wide from Bucky’s hunched, frozen form, swallowing and killing everything that it touches. 

_This_ is how Pierce planned for Bucky to be the kingdom’s doom. When everything green and growing and living in the land is withered in its soil, none of them will survive. It was all leading to tonight, when the entire kingdom is joined in hopeful celebration, an invisible thread of connection, a well of hope now running with poison. They will be starved and laid bare, carrion for their neighbors to pick apart like feasting crows. 

But that recognition only lasts a moment before the black void of the land around them fades in Steve’s vision and in his consciousness, his focus coming back to Bucky—the dark, terrifying heart of it all. 

Another freezing blast of spectral wind hits Steve like a wall, forcing him to squeeze his eyes shut tight against the onslaught, tears leaking from the corners, and his skin seizes and contracts with both the force and the cold. He shudders again, and wraps his arms around himself as it batters him, leaning into it, refusing to be driven back. 

When he can open his eyes again, he can hardly see Bucky anymore within the swirling mass of blue and black—somehow flame and fog at once—which is raveling its way around and off of him. It blurs the edges of Bucky’s body, like the outline of him is leeching away into it, fraying. He’s half-hunched and crooked, his shoulders at odd angles, and he holds one hand stretched away from himself, while the other claws at his throat, as if neither hand is aware of the other or under his control. His eyes are wide and staring, so dark they drain the color out of everything else—

It’s what Bucky has feared all along, this moment—disappearing, becoming nothing but a vessel of destruction. 

Steve can just make Bucky out, the twisted lines of his white face unfamiliar as if he were someone else—something else—entirely. 

Steve staggers half a step toward the seething storm, and Bucky’s head jerks up toward him and Bucky—or whatever has taken over Bucky’s body—snarls, teeth no longer his own either, but sharp points of gleaming obsidian. 

A jolt of pure, animal terror pulses through Steve, bitterness rising at the back of his throat—adrenaline or bile, it would be impossible to say—and he gropes on instinct at his hip for the sword which is not there, his fingers closing on nothing. 

A second wave of fear crashes over him, more pointed this time as he realizes that even if he had his sword he couldn’t use it. He can’t fight anything to protect Bucky now, not when the thing in the teeming darkness is Bucky. He lets out a helpless noise which is swallowed up by the howling whirlwind. 

He can feel the ice invading his own bones now, too, clutching at his heart and coursing through him—it’s the same power that had withered the flowers, ignited the trees, and blackened the landscape, worming its way under his skin, freezing the blood in his veins, cementing his feet to the ground and locking his joints. 

He should run. Every survival instinct he has, whatever small spark of warmth there is left in him is screaming to be protected, for him to get away from the gale that threatens to extinguish it for good—

_Bucky._

Steve swallows hard, clenches and unclenches his fists at his side to make sure he still has some power of movement. As long as there’s a flicker of warmth left in him, he can’t flee. He can’t leave Bucky alone in the cold, consuming darkness. 

When there’s nothing left to fight, his mother had said, when power cannot match power, the only brave thing that matters at all is love. 

And Steve knows he would rather die now, loving Bucky, than live—no, survive—a hundred more years having abandoned him to this. 

He takes a step forward. And then another. 

The black earth beneath his feet seems to churn and roil under his boots, grasping and clutching and trying to hold him in place. His ankles and knees and hips ache with the pure blue cold climbing his legs from the soles of his feet, sending spikes of pain into his bones. 

Steve staggers a little, but takes another step, closing the distance between him and Bucky. 

He’s reached the edge of the blueblack tempest now, where the fog is pale and insidious, and invisible fingers tear at his hair, his clothes, his skin, searing and freezing him. 

But he can see Bucky again at the center of it, where the color around him is blackest and foaming, dark eyes and teeth in a taut, white face—just visible through the veil of magic consuming him. 

Steve lifts his hand, and Bucky’s body, which has been convulsing in starts and jerks and undulating waves, goes still— 

Something crosses over his face, a great, twisting effort, and his lips draw back from his teeth, and he gestures with a claw-like hand with a jerky flick of his wrist. 

_“Go!”_

The word comes out as a growling snarl, and Steve freezes for a moment, trying to figure out if it was Bucky or the thing inside him commanding it. 

It doesn’t matter. It’s not an option. 

Steve shakes his head, once, feeling like his neck is rusted in place on his shoulders. 

“ _It…will…kill…_ ” comes the ruined, rasping voice again from Bucky’s lips, every word sounding as if it’s been forced through a sandstorm. 

This time Steve knows it’s Bucky—or whatever is left of him—telling him to run. 

But that means there’s something left of Bucky in there still to care. 

It’s more than enough. 

“No,” Steve says, shouting to be heard over the wail of the otherworldly wind. “I love you Bucky—and I won’t leave you alone.” 

And with that he musters every last drop of warmth and strength he can dredge up, and he steps forward into the darkness.

***


	9. The Golden Web

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A curse broken, a crown settled, and a happily ever after.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's hard to believe this is the final piece of this project! We're really excited to bring you this last bit, but also kind of bummed it's going to be over?? But as yesterday really WAS midsummer here in the real world the timing also feels just right. 
> 
> We hope you enjoyed following this collaboration as much as we enjoyed working on it, it has been so nice looking forward each week to hearing what you thought about the chapter! (And if you are reading this down the road, welcome!! we hope you liked it too!) 
> 
> So I guess without further ado...a final chapter + epilogue, because you know I always want to make sure you get that sweet sweet soft ending you (and Steve and Bucky) deserve :)

For many months, Bucky had felt as if there were a small, dark cell that had been hollowed out in a remote corner of his chest, that something else had made a home of. It was the curse, of course, that much he’d known. 

Now he knows much more than that. 

It was the remote, fathomless place from which his nightmares had sometimes crept out during the long nights, over which a grate had been locked as long as the sun touched him. 

But he’d always known that what lived there would not stay at the bottom of it forever. 

At last, it had made its final escape, and as it rushes forth to conquer, it had flung Bucky—his true self—down that long, dark well in its stead. 

He can still feel his body moving, distantly. But he has no control over it. When the jagged points of his teeth tear at his lips as the thing which now owns him snarls, he can feel the pricks of pain. But he can’t stop it. 

All he can do is huddle within himself, watching it all from the bottom of a bottomless well. 

When Steve—golden, beautiful, brave Steve—steps toward him, he musters up every ounce of strength he has to scream across the vast distance to the world to warn him not to come any closer. 

Bucky knows with every fiber still tenuously holding him to existence that he can’t restrain the power coursing through him, and that this time destruction will be complete. 

Steve won’t be spared. Nothing will be spared. 

It takes all of his strength to make his own mouth form the words of warning. 

But it isn’t enough. 

Steve’s jaw clenches, his eyes blazing in his tense, white face, and he steps into the grasping arms of Bucky’s darkness. 

And Bucky closes his eyes. 

Rather, he gives his eyes over along with the rest of himself, taken by no choice of his own, his sight the last thread which he allows to snap. He lets the darkness swallow him, the cover of the dark well slamming shut over the small tunnel of his vision as he retreats inside it. 

He doesn’t want to see what happens next. He doesn’t want to know if there will be time for dawning realization to creep over Steve’s face before the darkness takes him too—for Bucky to see the moment in which Steve recognizes what exactly it is that he foolishly thought to love. 

Bucky knew all along that Steve could only love him because he didn’t really understand, he couldn’t know the depth of the well in him, how deep the darkness had burrowed to make its home in his soul. Steve thought he could love the Bucky that walked in sunlight, his fragile body and human heart concealing what lurked within. 

Now the insidious magic is all that is left, and Bucky feels himself sinking into it fully—welcoming it, not as a friend, but as oblivion, reprieve from seeing anything at all as Steve learns how wrong he was. 

But the curse is cruel to the last, even in this. 

As he descends, falling and freezing and floating all at once as a shell of ice slowly encases him, still he becomes aware of painful sparks of sensation—little points of unbearable heat flaring on his skin out there in the world. 

It’s the feeling of coming in from the cold and stepping into a too-hot bath, and he cringes away from it. But his body isn’t his own anymore, and doesn’t respond to his commands to pull away from the pain that he knows are the futile, dying flickers of Steve’s hands and Steve’s love for him, just enough to pierce the darkness so that Bucky will know when the end arrives, not just for himself, but for all that he cares for, too. 

Bucky had thought he’d severed the final strand of his connection to the world that was his own when he’d shut his mind’s eye to it. But he finds that there is one more gossamer filament left in him, loving Steve. 

As much as he longs for the numbness of being untethered, to be drowned entirely in the void, he doesn’t have it in him to snap that thread. And it’s painful, like a razor sharp wire tightening around his heart even as he recognizes it. 

Bucky waits, every cell of him taut, for it to fade or be cut out of him, as he knows it must in a moment or minutes when the curse succeeds in snuffing Steve out like a candle in a howling storm. 

Yet…the line doesn’t break. Bucky stills inside himself, hesitant. He gropes in the darkness for the cord, feeling it tighten further still, and ripple like a line catching a fish. Or perhaps he’s the one caught, hooked and reeled in by it. 

Maybe it isn’t his line to break, even if he wanted to. He could no more stop loving Steve than he could watch Steve stop loving him, and maybe…maybe Steve hasn’t stopped loving him either. Maybe there is no realization dawning on Steve in this darkness, but just the two of them, and Steve diving head first in because Bucky had chosen to sink and Steve wasn’t going to let him go alone. 

He can’t control the rising tide of grief and loss inside him, his heart swelling as if it might burst with it like an overripe peach. 

Steve is so good and true to the last. Bucky loves him so, and that love is like a knife, slicing him open to spill what’s left into the darkness. 

The pain of being cut open and poured out suddenly goes liquid in him with something like relief as he acknowledges it, and he blinks rapidly in the consuming dark. He doesn’t know if it’s just his imagination, but he can almost see the strand tethering him to Steve now, fine and silver as a spider’s web. It’s so fragile, stretched thin to reach him here in the depths. But it doesn’t break.

_I love you Bucky, and I won’t leave you alone._

The words echo distantly, and the thread trembles like a plucked harp string. Bucky can see it clearer now, glowing faint and golden. 

_And I love you_ , Bucky whispers into the chasm, _and I won’t try to make you leave again._

Bucky shudders, and focuses whatever is left of himself on the love pouring out of him. If he’s going to be used up, if his life is spilled tonight and his body sucked dry by the curse raging through him, he wants at least to make sure that the tiny piece of him that is his own is poured into _this_. 

It hums through him, quietly at first, as he thinks of Steve—of the day they’d first met all those years ago, because Bucky should have understood his stubbornness even then. Of his hair on their pillow in the morning light, of his shoulders freckling in the sun, of his arms wrapped so strong but so gentle around him. 

And slowly, other things come to him, too—because love is never finite, it cannot be used up. Using up love only creates more of it. So Bucky thinks of his mother and her patient steadiness, his father and his kind wisdom, Rebecca and her clever, good heart. 

He’s so consumed, thinking that if these moments are to be his last that he wants to spend it in these golden memories, that he doesn’t realize at first that the soft hum is growing louder within him, and that the single golden strand connecting him to Steve has become a web, halting his fall into the darkness. 

But then he notices that the paralyzing cold that had held his limbs has begun—ever so slightly—to thaw. And he thinks maybe, just _maybe_ he can feel his true body again even in the clutches of the spell. 

Bucky musters all the courage that he can, wrapping himself in the web like a cloak—and opens his eyes. 

Steve is before him, his face twisted in pain but still on his feet, his hands clasped tight to either side of Bucky’s face, and Bucky can see his own monstrous hands gripped around Steve’s wrists, the veins on the back of them standing out black against his pale white skin where the poisonous magic courses through in place of blood. 

There’s little else to see, the veiling shroud and swirl of magic obscuring everything else beyond. But it doesn’t matter, he didn’t force himself back into his body for however many fleeting moments he can stay for any of that—he just wanted to feel Steve under his hands one more time. 

With great effort, he releases his viselike grip on Steve’s wrists, moving shaky, clawed hands that nonetheless can feel again to Steve’s face. His beard is rough on Bucky’s palms, and his cheeks smooth under his thumbs. 

Steve’s eyes fly open, alarmingly blue in his bloodless face. But whatever he sees, he must understand that something of Bucky has returned—at least enough to say goodbye—because he surges forward, and presses his lips to Bucky’s in a desperate, ungraceful kiss. 

Bucky tastes blood in it—whether his own or Steve’s he isn’t sure—but he doesn’t pull away. His hands move to the back of Steve’s head to drag him closer, counting the moments that pass, each one feeling stolen from the end of everything, waiting to fall again into the dark. 

But he doesn’t. Steve draws back after a long moment with a gasp, pressing his forehead to Bucky’s tightly and squeezing his eyes shut. 

There’s lacy frost clinging to Steve’s eyelashes, where his tears had been frozen by the cold magic. But as Bucky watches, breathless, they melt again, trailing warm tracks down Steve’s cheeks. 

Around them, the impenetrable dark flickers, the golden web clinging to Bucky’s shoulders dissolving into little golden motes of dust that glint and shimmer around them against the unending black. 

Bucky takes in a harsh breath, refusing to believe what seems impossible, and he yanks Steve to his chest, wrapping him in a crushing embrace which Steve returns with equal force, burying his face in the curve of Steve’s neck. 

But the golden light doesn’t let them be. Soon the spots of it are expanding, plucking at Bucky’s hair, and Steve’s shirt, the gold bleeding green as it brightens further and further around them. It follows the track that the seeping grey and black had clawed a path from Bucky moments or hours or days ago, and—suddenly—there is grass exploding to life under Bucky’s feet. 

His eyes follow it as it makes a flickering track away from him, reclaiming the territory that had been lost—his eyes see the moment it reaches the peach he had dropped, a rotten lump of blackened fruit that swells in an instant, pink and orange, more vibrant than it had even been before. There’s a burst and fluttering shower around them, and Bucky’s eyes are drawn up to the branches of their trees, where every single one regardless of its right season has burst into new bloom even around the clusters of fruit, white and pink blossoms billowing from between the ranches to cascade to the earth below. 

Beyond the walls, the golden-green light races over the hills, briefly illuminating everything with the full glow of midday for an instant—long enough to see all the land touched by it shivering with the same furious, joyful growth of green life as Bucky feels a last enormous, surging from the soles of his feet through the walls of his chest, shining in his eyes and flooding from his fingertips. 

He brings his gaze back to Steve’s face, his cheeks bright pink in the glare of day that isn’t daylight at all. 

Bucky’s mouth drops open in pure disbelief—then the sensation crests like a tidal wave, and is done, and the world around them fades into purple twilight again. 

Bucky takes in a single, testing breath, and feels nothing in between his ribs but his own lungs filling and his own heart beating rapidly like the wings of a caged bird, his body nothing but a body, no magic left but the rising understanding that something impossible had happened after all—

And then his body, which is only a body, and his mind which is his alone, can’t quite grasp the enormity of any of it. 

Bucky faints, and knows no more. 

***

It wouldn’t be precisely correct to say that Bucky knows that he sleeps for a long time, because dream time never passes the same as waking hours. But he is aware, distantly, that he dreams many dreams—and that none of them are nightmares. 

Once or twice, or a handful of times, perhaps, he comes close to the surface of them—like swimming in a shining pool of water and pushing off the bottom, pointing your face to the light knowing that your head will break through into the air at any moment. But each time, he sees the dims shapes and hears the muffled sounds from the shore, and doesn’t quite manage to break the surface. Instead, he lets himself sink again, floating peacefully deeper back into sleep, and the cycle of unconsciousness and dreaming begins again. 

So he knows, at least, when he at last takes a breath that he feels sharply in his lungs, and stirs on sheets he is aware of sliding beneath his fingers, that he has been asleep for some time. 

The first sensation that comes to him as he blinks away the last of the sleep clinging to his mind and gives himself over to the waking world is his mouth as he takes in a long breath, tacky and disgusting. 

Bucky groans and rolls onto his back against his pillow, trying to keep his tongue from sticking to the roof of it. 

“’M thirsty,” he slurs, still too sleep-muddled to really wonder if there’s anyone in the warm, waiting stillness beyond himself to hear or care. His voice comes out as a croak from a throat that feels like a desert. 

But there’s a rustling beside him, and then a cool hand on his forehead, and a soft voice that says, 

“Can you sit up, darling?”

Bucky blinks his eyes blearily, frowning at the familiarity of the voice. 

His mother’s face, lined and concerned, but radiant with the sun behind it, swims into focus. She puts a hand under his shoulder as he struggles to sit up enough for her to press a cold glass of water into his hand. 

Bucky shakes his head as he takes a sip of it, trying to remember why his mother is here—has he been sick? It should be a servant, his valet, handing him what he asks for first thing in the morning—

No, that isn’t right either, he remembers, as more of the pieces fall back into place as he orients himself, it should be Steve—he isn’t at home, he’s at the garden house in the valley, far from the palace—

“Mama,” he says, blinking at her in confusion. But his voice sounds better, and feels better, not so parched as the water soothe it. “You’re here?” 

Winifred smiles, and strokes soft fingers through his pillow-tangled hair, pushing it back from his hot forehead. There are thick streaks of grey in her dark hair that he doesn’t remember being so prevalent before. 

“I’m here, dear one,” she murmurs. “How do you feel?” 

“I don’t know,” Bucky answers, honestly, setting the empty glass on his bedside table. 

His mind is still fogged, reaching back over however many cloudy hours it’s been that he was asleep—what had happened? He feels a little bubble of fear rise and burst in his stomach, there was something…

He glances around the bright bedroom, and notes several changes since he last vaguely remembers being inside of it. There had been a bowl of marigolds on the window sill, which is gone, replaced by a tall vase of hollyhocks. And beneath the window is a low makeshift bed, discreetly tucked against the wall that certainly wasn’t there before. The floor is taken up by several new trunks and stacks of clothing as well that don’t belong to him. 

“Why are you here?” he asks. Then suddenly, more urgently as memory returns to him— _the garden, the darkness, the curse_ —“where is Steve?” His head whips around, a little frantic, as if Steve might appear in the corner, but of course, he doesn’t. 

“Shhh,” his mother hushes, placing a gentle hand on his shoulder. “He’s downstairs in the garden, he—he’ll be back soon, I’m sure.” 

Bucky takes in a shuddering breath of relief, turning his eyes back to her, and nods. 

Her eyes had been fixed on him, it’s clear, an intent expression of watchful curiosity on her face, which she quickly covers with a smile. Bucky blushes, and lets himself sink back onto his pillows, buying himself a moment to avoid her knowing look. 

“What happened?” He asks again. “How did you get here?” 

His limbs all feel stiff from the long sleep, and he surreptitiously begins to stretch, feeling his joints pop and protest as if they’ve rusted in place while he was motionless. 

His mother, who is seated in a chair at his bedside that didn’t used to be here, busies herself refilling the glass from a blue ceramic pitcher on the nightstand. 

“You’ve been asleep for three days, my angel. We came as soon as—as soon as we knew that we should.” 

Bucky nods, swallowing. “You came because the curse—Midsummer—” 

She nods, smiling sadly. “I wish we had done sooner. It—it hurts me to know that you were alone, when it happened.” 

“I wasn’t alone,” Bucky says, simply, this time meeting her eyes. 

She gazes back at him for a long moment, and then nods again, once. “No. No, I know that you were not. I’m glad.” 

“But how did you know that it had—that it was over?” He asks again, sitting up more fully. 

He has his bearings now, and he remembers—Pierce’s curse taking him over, sinking into the darkness, and then Steve, the golden web, and the spell reversing or—or whatever had happened. Then he’d fainted, spent. _Three days_. It’s a long time to have been asleep, with the world evidently restarting and moving on all around him. 

His mother’s hand tightens on his shoulder again, and her face twists as if in pain. She shakes her shoulders with a sharp breath, as if driving off the bad memory that had alighted on her shoulders.

“The entire kingdom felt it, when the curse took hold, and everything went dark. For a few minutes it seemed the entire palace was burning. And I knew that it had hold of you, somehow, I felt it. Your father and your sister, too. But then it—wasn’t.” She pauses, looking down at her crimson-clad lap. “And when the darkness cleared, Alexander Pierce’s body had appeared on the palace steps.” She pauses again, and Bucky’s eyes widen as he takes it in—as he understands that it really, truly is over. “He’s dead, my darling. And his curse with him.” 

Bucky just stares back at her for a long moment, numb with disbelief. Then before he has any warning that he’s going to, he sobs, and his eyes spill over instantly with hot tears of relief. 

“Oh my love,” Winifred says, her voice cracking as answering tears spring to her eyes. And she throws herself forward out of her chair, and wraps Bucky in her arms as if he were a very small boy again, and runs her hands down his back as he cries, hushing and crooning soft, comforting things into his hair. 

At last, Bucky weeps himself into silence, aside from a few weak hiccups, feeling utterly drained—but cleaned, somehow, too. Not a hollow emptiness like he had in the mornings after a nightmare, but like the earth after a long spring rain, everything washed away except what ought to be there, ready to grow something new. 

He snuffles a little, pitifully, and his mother draws back and offers him a handkerchief, which he accepts gratefully. 

“Steve?” He asks again, his voice small. And he doesn’t care this time about how his mother’s eyes glint with understanding. “Is he—he’s alright?”

Winifred smiles, tightly. “He is unhurt in body, but—” she pauses, and looks wry. “He’s been haunting this room like a ghost. My creativity has been stretched, trying to find reasons to make him get a little fresh air when I could. He will be very glad to know that you’ve woken. He—he loves you a great deal, my angel.” 

Bucky nods, twisting his fingers in the crumpled white sheet in his lap, his hands a little shaky. 

“And I love him.” 

He raises his gaze again to her face, chin wobbling a little and eyes threatening to overfill again with tears, and Winifred reaches out and cups his cheek with her hand, tenderly. 

“Yes,” his mother says. 

They sit in silent a moment more like that, Bucky letting himself be comforted by his mother’s touch as if he were a child again, seeking reassurance after a fall or a fight. 

“He will want to know,” she says, finally. “I’ll go find him.” 

Bucky nods quickly. “Please.” 

“I—” Winifred hesitates, half rising from the edge of the bed. “Your father and Rebecca will also want to know you’re awake—and to see you. We’ve _all_ been worried.” 

He hears the unasked question, the request under her words. And as much as he wants and needs to see Steve, to reassure himself that he’d come through the darkness on Midsummer unscathed, he understands. 

“Tell them I’m up,” he says. “I’ve been worried for them, too.” 

His mother’s face relaxes, and she smiles more widely this time as she stands, shaking out the creases in her gown before heading to the door. 

The moment it clicks behind her Bucky swings his legs to the side of the bed, wanting to clean his teeth and splash some water on his certainly blotchy, tear-stained face before they return. His legs are unsteady under him, shooting little pins and needles through him as he hurries to the vanity, but he doesn’t mind. He just needs to get them moving again. 

Bucky washes quickly, listening for footsteps on the stair. He even manages to push a hasty comb through the sweaty tangles of his hair, and to tie it back in a messy braid, returning to collapse onto the bed before there are any sounds of movement outside. 

It required more energy from him than he’d like to admit, just walking to and from the other side of the bedroom, and he lies quietly on the pillows for a few more moments, just catching his breath. 

When the footsteps come, it’s an absolutely thunderous sound, and Bucky briefly wonders if his mother had also informed Jacinth that he is receiving guests, and if the horse had made its way into the cottage. 

The door bursts open though, slamming with a crash against the wall, and it isn’t Jacinth but Rebecca, making enough noise for an army, who flings herself into the room with a cry of happiness. 

Bucky grins as his sister throws herself into his arms, hugging him so tightly his ribs almost creak. Then she draws back and shoves both his shoulders so that he falls back to the pillows with a little _oof_. 

Becca gives him a mock glare, hands on her hips, though the smile is just barely hidden as she points a finger at him. 

“Three _days_ Bucky!” She says, “Three _days_. You think about that if you ever decide you deserve a nap again, you’ve already used up your limit.” 

“Yes, Rebecca,” Bucky says, too happy to see her to play along by arguing. Becca’s fake glare disappears into a bright smile, and she flops down on the end of his bed, squeezing his ankle underneath the sheet. 

“You scared us,” Becca says, a little quieter. “But you aren’t hurt? There’s nothing still…?” 

Bucky shakes his head, still feeling the surprise of it himself. “Nothing. It’s over. For all of us, I think. Whatever else Pierce had planned.”

“More than you know,” says his father’s deep, quiet voice from the doorway, as he follows Rebecca’s entrance at a more sedate pace, Winifred on his arm. 

They come around the side of the bed, and George leans down to kiss his son on the forehead, his hand stroking over Bucky’s hair once or twice, as if reassuring himself that he’s real. Then George takes the chair that Winifred had occupied earlier, and Winifred seats herself gracefully on the arm of it, smiling at her husband as he slips an arm around her waist. 

They’re all smiling. Bucky feels like the smiles might be incurably contagious at this rate, his cheeks aching with it, but he can’t stop. He really is desperately happy to see them. He glances at door though, waiting—but the hall outside is quiet again, so he turns most of his attention back to his father for the time being. 

“What do you mean, more than I know?” Bucky asks, curiously, registering what his father had said as he’d entered the room. 

“Pierce’s plans,” his father says, looking serious. “Your curse, his attack on the land was a piece, but—” he pauses, looking over at Becca. “Rebecca, would you like to tell your brother your part in things these past days?” 

Bucky raises his eyebrows at his sister, and she preens, looking like the cat that got the cream. But she says, with a tone of pure modesty, “I wouldn’t want to brag.” 

George snorts, and Bucky turns his aggressively curious eyebrows to his father again. 

“Of course not, daughter,” his father says, a hint of laughter in his voice. But there’s pride there, too. He turns his attention back to Bucky, who smacks his hand on top of the sheet impatiently. 

“ _Some_ one tell me,” he says. Rebecca kicks him lightly, and he sticks his tongue out at her. 

“It’s going to sound silly when the poets put you both into song, and have to include how you made faces at each other after having saved the kingdom,” George remarks, neutrally. 

Bucky pulls his tongue back into his mouth, surprised out of his efforts to annoy his sister. 

“How?” He says, more this time without any joking in his voice. 

Becca sobers too, and rests her hand again on his legs under the blanket. 

“The letter you sent me,” she begins, slowly, and Bucky frowns, recalling the contents. “I did as you asked and inquired. At the time I was told it did not seem…pertinent,” she says, delicately, glancing at their father, “beyond your suspicions, which became my own.” 

“By which she means that I was too distracted chasing other things to listen properly,” George says, staunchly, seeming unbothered by having to admit to it. “I told her she was borrowing trouble, worrying about northern fiefdoms when there were more pressing matters at hand. But your sister had the good sense to ignore me and take action of her own. While I ignored everything aside from trying to ensure our food stores and supplies, should the harvest fail—” 

“—an equally important thing,” Rebecca interjects, and the king gives her a stately nod. 

“Thank you—but not the only important thing, as I’d have seen if I’d heard you out as I should,” he says, and then turns back to Bucky, who makes another impatient noise. “As it turned out there _was_ something to fear from the north, which the contingent of soldiers your sister deployed of her own volition discovered. There was an army being raised for rebellion—several of the northern duchies—which we now know was meant to have made its move on the royal city in the days following the Midsummer festival.” His father shakes his head, looking grave. “Had the curse been successful, we would have been devastated, unable to defend ourselves. But with Pierce dead, and the element of surprise taken from them—” 

Bucky gapes at Rebecca, with mixed surprise and admiration. “You put down a rebellion all alone?” 

Becca tosses her dark, glossy head, but her satisfaction is evident. “Well, a hundred or two complement of soldiers certainly deserve some of the credit—and the few of them who had alerted you to the problem in the first place, and knew exactly where they needed to be positioned to halt things in their tracks.”

“Pierce meant to make himself king, then,” Bucky says, darkly. 

Becca shrugs. “Certainly several of the warlords in the north thought he meant to make _them_ king—but yes.” 

Bucky looks between his father and sister—the pride on George’s face, and the calm self-assurance on Rebecca’s—and it strikes him that maybe something that has felt very difficult to him all his life is actually very simple. A slow smile begins to spread itself over his face. 

Rebecca always was better for this kind of thing than him. 

He opens his mouth to say something, to give voice to his hope, to the obvious solution to a problem that maybe never needed to be a problem in the first place, when he’s distracted again by a noise from outside the room. 

The footsteps are rushed and heavy, of feet which by the sound of it are taking the stairs at least two at a time—and Bucky turns his shining face to the door, knowing exactly this time who it is he is going to see there. 

Steve crashes across the small living chamber, and then skids to a halt at the open door. He’s breathing heavily, clearly having run from wherever it was he’d been moments ago—but his eyes go wide and uncertain at the sight of the king, queen, and princess already gathered in the little room. 

His mouth drops open as he tries to gather himself to bow. But he can’t quite tear his eyes off of Bucky long enough to make a proper one. The movement is jerky and incomplete, and his expression is agonized as he holds himself still in the doorway, desperately drinking in Bucky’s face. 

George and Winifred exchange a look, and Becca ducks her head, hiding whatever expression might be there. 

Bucky ignores them entirely, everything narrowing for a moment to just Steve. 

Steve clasps his hands behind his back, and Bucky can see that he’s wringing them—but still he holds himself respectfully apart, standing at parade rest, despite the muscle twitching in his jaw. 

“Your majesties,” he says, inclining his head. 

“Captain Rogers,” George says, sliding another sideways glance at Winifred, who nods almost imperceptibly, a very small smile tucked at the corner of her mouth. “There’s no need for you to stand on ceremony with us now—please, come in. Ja—Bucky has been waiting for you.” 

Steve holds himself tall and rigid for one more moment, meeting the king’s eyes before accepting the invitation. And then it looks as if every inch of him is sighing in relief, and he strides to the edge of Bucky’s bed—across from where his family sits gathered around him. 

Bucky holds out his arms in his own silent invitation, chest aching with longing for Steve to be wrapped in them again, and this time Steve doesn’t hesitate or seek permission from the king. He lowers himself gently onto the bed beside Bucky, reaching for him with hands that only Bucky can tell are shaking, until he can pull Bucky to his chest, and bury his nose into Bucky’s hair with a long, shuddering sigh that isn’t quite a sob, but nearly. 

Bucky squeezes his eyes shut tight as he loops his arms around Steve’s waist, pressing into his solid warmth as if he could crawl inside of him, not paying any attention to his family or whatever silent conversation they may be having beside him. He doesn’t care about anything else but the fact that Steve is here, he’s here and they’re both alright. 

When he opens them again, his mother, father, and Rebecca are gone, leaving he and Steve alone on the bed in the middle of the sun-filled room. 

Bucky takes a steadying breath, and tips his head to look up into Steve’s face. 

Steve’s eyes are dark blue as ever, his long lashes swept low over his cheeks as he looks down at Bucky. He swallows, and Bucky watches the bob of his throat, reaching up with deft fingers to slide them into the long silky hair at the nape of Steve’s neck. Steve moves one of his hands from around Bucky’s waist to cup his cheek. 

“You came back to me,” Steve says at last, in a half-whisper, rough with emotion. 

“You stayed,” Bucky replies, quietly. 

For a moment they both just stare at one another, their faces mirrored with equal incredulity as if the choice for either of them had _ever_ been a question. 

Then Steve’s face breaks into a brilliant, blinding grin and Bucky can’t help but answer him, laughing a little at the heady joy sweeping through him, until Steve swoops down and kisses him, the laughter lost to Steve’s soft lips on his. 

They break away after a few moments, and Steve’s thumb scrapes almost fiercely along Bucky’s cheek, like he still can’t believe he’s here. 

“I don’t plan to leave again,” Bucky says. 

Steve’s eyes soften, and drop to Bucky’s mouth, and then back up to meet his gaze. 

“And I will always stay.” 

Bucky bites the inside of his cheek, thinking of the realization he’d had just a few minutes ago—about Rebecca, the girl who should be king, and hesitates, strangely nervous. 

“Even if—if I don’t ever go back home? If I choose to stay in—in exile?” 

Steve searches his face, understanding registering as he turns over the words, and he nods slowly, pulling Bucky more firmly to him with the arm still wrapped around his waist. 

“You are home,” he says at last, tilting to rest his forehead against Bucky’s, and Bucky lets his eyes drift shut, and Steve’s words settle in around him, binding as magic, true as goodness. 

“And so am I.” 

***

October, or: A Season Later 

Sarah’s voice floats up to Steve where he’s braced in the upper branches of the apple tree, doing his best to pick as many of the ripe apples as he can before they fall to the ground and get too bruised to be good for anything but cider. Not that he isn’t looking forward to putting up some cider as well, but Steve has a general love of anything apple-based, and he doesn’t want to miss out on apple pie and apple butter and apple tarts, especially since Sarah has come to stay the month. 

But it’s slow going, because he’s also spending too much time enjoying eavesdropping on his mother’s and Bucky’s conversation below. Today they’re making their way through the garden collecting seeds from some of the plants that are finally fading for the season, so that Bucky can plant them again next year. 

“Your roses have had quite the second wind this fall,” Sarah says, lifting a drowsy, full blown bloom in her pale hand to sniff. 

“That one never quite got over its first wind,” Bucky remarks, moving to stand beside her, and looking up at where the rose clambers enthusiastically over its arched trellis above the low stone bench. “It bloomed right on through the summer without a break—well,” he amends, awkwardly, “except the one, obviously.” 

Sarah nods, humming thoughtfully. “What do you like to think of, when you sit here?” 

Steve smiles when Bucky stammers a little bit, and he can picture the blush on his sharp cheekbones even if he can’t quite see it through the red-tipped leaves of the apple tree. 

“Oh I—here? I—suppose it’s—Steve,” he says at last, resigned to the embarrassment of the confession. “This spot usually makes me think of Steve.” 

Sarah smiles, and places a gentle hand on Bucky’s arm. “I always think of Steve when I’m working where I want my flowers to do best too. Flowers are sentimental about that kind of thing.”

Steve, a little too focused on listening to the two people he loves most in the world talking about how much they love him, is a little careless with the apple he’s reached for, and it drops between the branches to the ground with a thud. 

Sarah laughs, and Steve mouth twists in a wry smile as he begins his descent from the tree, giving it up as a task for another time. 

“Now on the other hand, Bucky,” Sarah says, raising her voice slightly so that Steve knows she’s really speaking for his benefit. “I recommend that you don’t work with the flowers when you’re angry—flowers are too sensitive for that.”

“And why would I get angry?” Bucky asks, his voice colored with amusement. 

Steve drops lightly to his feet from the last branch, and sets the sack half-filled with apples beside the trunk, joining them. 

“Because my son is infuriating,” Sarah says, serenely, looping her arm in Steve’s as he steps up beside her. “As infuriating as he is lovable.” She looks at Bucky again, seriously. “I recommend that when he’s more the former than the latter, you work with your herbs. Herbs don’t mind bitterness. Or peppers, if you keep any—the fire does them good, too.” 

“Mama,” Steve says, with mock sternness, “if I’d known these were the kinds of lessons you’d be offering at my expense I would have told you we’d had early snows or something.” 

Sarah laughs, a bright sound like tinkling bells, and the happy, carefree lilt of it, here in _their_ garden, does Steve’s heart good for all his teasing. Almost as much good as it does to see how Sarah now loops her other arm in Bucky’s so that she’s caught between them, and how Bucky’s mouth tucks into the corners in a small smile of pleasure at the gesture too. 

“Nonsense,” she says, lightly, “I’m sure I’m not telling Bucky anything he doesn’t know—about _you_ at least, my Steven.”

“Not a bit,” Bucky says, archly, grinning at Steve over her silver-blonde head. 

“Now, what else would you like to be sure we save for next season?” Sarah says, turning them so that the trio is facing again out across the garden. 

Bucky purses his lips in thought. “Well—the asters and the Larkspur, definitely. But they aren’t yet gone to seed.” 

Sarah nods, her eyes trailing over the spots of red and blue in their respective patches along the garden wall. 

“I think you’ll find you can bend things out of season more now, if you feel strongly about them.” 

Bucky glances again at Steve, and ducks his head. It doesn’t escape Steve that they’re the two flowers that had made up his crown, that fateful day, and he feels himself blushing a little too, inexplicably self-conscious at how Bucky’s feelings have made themselves known here among the flowers even without him trying. 

It had taken a little while after the trial of Midsummer for them to realize that the events of the day hadn’t left Bucky entirely unmarked by the magic and power that had made him its conduit. But as the summer had waned into autumn, it had become clear that Bucky’s efforts in the garden were being aided by something slightly more potent than just the enthusiasm he’d brought to it through the spring. Plants that grew up overnight after he’d tended to them, pests that had disappeared from leaves after he expressed his annoyance at their presence. It had been obvious that when Bucky spoke, the garden had started to listen.

Aside from an honest desire just to see her, it had been one of the reasons Steve had invited his mother to visit. On her first morning with Bucky in the garden she’d covered his hands with her own as he’d worked, and after a few minutes with her brow furrowed in concentration she’d looked up and nodded decisively. 

“You’ve a bit of green magic in your hands now, Bucky,” she’d said. 

Bucky had received the declaration with some trepidation. His experiences with magic had not been positive ones, and Steve had seen the twist of fear at the idea of being anything except just himself again. But Sarah had seen it too, and cupped Bucky’s face in one hand, reassuring him. 

“It’s good magic, love. It just means that now when you speak, your garden will be able to hear you better than it did before—and it will try to do what you ask.” She’d paused, considering her words. “It’s nothing that will shake the world again. But it will remember when you did, and you have a small line open to speak to it that you didn’t before because of that memory.” 

Bucky had looked reluctant another moment, and then nodded. 

Over the days she’s been here, working side by side with him, Steve had watched the reluctance fade bit by bit as Sarah had showed Bucky how to wield the hedge magic she’s practiced so long, and Bucky had seen how different that kind of magic is. 

Now Bucky looks only eager when Sarah suggests, “You said there were some old bulbs in the garden shed? Let’s go see to them, and I’ll show you how to feel if there’s any life left. If any of them are good we can lay them in to sleep through the frost for next spring.” 

It’s hard to imagine the garden frosted over and sleeping for winter, with it still so full of warm colors, between the lingering blooms of the roses and the yellow and red leaves in the orchard. But there’s a nip in the air and a pearly grayness to the sky behind it reminding them that it is indeed autumn, and that the rains and snow aren’t too far off. 

Steve’s eyes linger on the roses climbing over the trellis that Bucky said makes him think of Steve. He darts a glance at Bucky, and finds him looking back, though Bucky ducks his head with a quickly concealed smile. 

Between them, Sarah laughs softly in her throat, and she squeezes Steve’s arm once before extricating herself. 

“On second thought, it’s getting rather chilly. I think I’d better step inside for my cloak.” She smiles at Bucky as she shakes out the heavy folds of her skirt around her. “Why don’t you meet me in a few minutes, when you’re ready.” 

Steve shakes his head, smile fond and wry at Sarah’s retreating back, before returning his attention to Bucky. 

Bucky reaches immediately for both of Steve’s hands, and they step forward into the shelter of the archway, so that Steve’s peripheral vision is filled with the fragrant blooms. 

“Your mother is a wise woman,” Bucky says, taking a half step closer, and sliding his hands to Steve’s elbows, tipping his head up to look at him with dancing eyes. 

“You’re learning a lot?” Steve asks, a teasing edge to his voice. 

“Mmm,” Bucky agrees, his voice quiet, swaying toward him closer still. “Like how to make a graceful exit when someone would very much like to be kissed.” 

“You can kiss me in front of my mother,” Steve says, his voice dropping low to match Bucky’s. 

“Not like this I can’t,” Bucky says, with a glimmer of mischief.

Bucky’s eyes go half-shut and hooded, and he closes the last space between them, pressing forward to kiss Steve in a way that very much convinces him it’s best his mother is out of sight, suggestive of many things that aren’t just kissing. 

Bucky pulls back, a sleepy kind of smile spreading over his features, and Steve feels a little dazed. 

“There,” Bucky says, sounding pleased with himself. 

“You convinced me,” Steve says, voice a little hoarse. 

“Of what?” Bucky asks, smile turning into a grin. 

Steve shakes his head, eyes still caught on Bucky’s mouth. “I don’t remember. Whatever it is, the answer is yes.” 

Bucky laughs, tossing his dark hair back over his shoulder. “I hadn’t asked for anything, but I’ll bank this yes away for later—I’m bound to think of something.”

Steve laughs too, and tips his forehead in to rest against Bucky’s. 

“I’m like your flowers now, I suppose,” he says, lightly, “you only have to ask and I’ll try to give it to you.”

“I don’t plan to ask you for anything you won’t enjoy giving,” Bucky replies. 

“To grow apples, or sprout cherry blossoms or something, you mean.” 

“No,” Bucky says with a chuckle, “I have all the fruit trees I need out here, and the magic in spades to command them, apparently. I only have one of you, who’s best at what you’re best at.”

“Such as?” Steve asks, unable to keep from tilting his lips again toward Bucky’s. 

Bucky’s mouth drops open, as if to say something, but he dissolves into another peal of laughter instead. 

“What?” Steve asks, smiling, as he runs his nose along Bucky’s smiling cheek. 

“I was going to say something, but everything that occurred to me was too absolutely full of disgusting sentiment to say out loud, I’d only embarrass myself,” Bucky says. 

Steve grins, leaning back to look into Bucky’s face. “My mother said flowers like sentiment, didn’t you hear?” 

Bucky just shakes his head, “Everything I was thinking would be much too much for them, they’d never settle down for the winter like they’re supposed to.” 

“Like that I’m the best at getting your braid just right, and making sure your hot water bottle is filled so you don’t get cold at night?” Steve suggests, “That I’m the only one who remembers where you’ve set down the book you’re reading when you lose it, and can always find just the exact knot between your shoulder blades when you’ve been working too long down here hunched over your charges?” 

Bucky’s smile softens, and he lifts a hand to rest his palm against Steve’s bearded jaw. “Yes, all those things—among others.” 

Steve tips his cheek into Bucky’s hand. “Good, I like to cultivate as broad a range of indispensable skills as I can manage for you.”

Steve moves quickly, snagging his arm around around Bucky’s waist to tug him tight against his body, and then kisses him again, deep enough to pay him back for how Bucky had kissed him a few moments ago. He keeps kissing him, unrelenting, until Bucky’s body starts to melt in his arms, supporting himself with his looped tightly around Steve’s neck. 

At last Bucky pulls back, his breath uneven, and pushes Steve away lightly with his hand at the center of his chest—but not too far. 

“Your _mother_ will be waiting for me,” Bucky says. “You aren’t playing fair at all.” 

Steve smiles at Bucky sweetly and releases him, turning to pick a small, deep pink rose from the riot of vines beside him. He tucks it into Bucky’s braid above his ear, and drops a light kiss on his nose, which is scrunched in a valiant effort at a frown. The expression evaporates entirely as Bucky feels for the flower with his fingertips. 

“I’m going to get you back for this, later,” Bucky says. His tone is teasing, and it sends a little spark of heat through Steve’s stomach. 

“Whatever you say, my Prince,” he says, with a small bow. 

Bucky snorts, swatting at Steve’s arm. Then he grabs a fistful of Steve’s shirt, and drags him in one more time for a last, possessive kiss. 

Steve makes sure to straighten his shirt and hair before they leave the shelter of the archway to find Sarah, not minding at all that the deepening chill of the fading day means they’ll be spending a long evening indoors by the fire. 

In fact, Steve minds the thought of a long winter very little just at this moment. 

They’ll keep each other warm.

***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, we'd love to hear from you on twitter! Come say hi or send us pics of YOUR gardening efforts at [@odetteandodile](https://twitter.com/odetteandodile) and [@inflomora_art](https://twitter.com/inflomora_art)!

**Author's Note:**

> we would love to know what you think, so drop us a kudo or a comment and make our day! 
> 
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